Here’s the good news about Obama’s
luxury RV
Unfortunately for Obama, there ends the good news. Yesterday one of the stimulus-fattened alternative energy companies Obama propped up went bankrupt. So much for green jobs. Meanwhile, in a town meeting in Minnesota, Obama helped put to bed the notion that he’s some kind of statist ideologue. Talking about the GM and Chrysler bailouts, he told voters:
Goodness knows how those crazy Tea Partiers got the idea that Obama wants to have the government manage the economy.
At the same event, Obama pulled out one of his favorite rhetorical formulations, what I like to think of as his “this is your last warning” line:
Now, we can’t have patience with that kind of behavior anymore.
I love this trope. Whether it’s hurting America or “bickering” or “playing games,” Obama pronounces that the time for this terrible stuff is over. As if it was perfectly fine to bicker and play games and throw your country under the bus four years ago. The subtext of this is, of course, You can’t do this anymore because I’m in charge, and therefore the whole world must now operate differently. So it was okay to vote against the debt ceiling in 2006, but we can’t have patience with that sort of behavior anymore—there’s a fierce urgency of now that didn’t exist back then. Or something.
But the best moment of day one of the Obama bus tour may have been a short exchange where the president agreed with Mickey Kaus that the New York Times is now basically the print version of MSNBC:
I wonder if the Times would dare take offense.
