The House just passed the stimulus package with no Republican support, and eight “no” votes from Democrats. Rep. Aaron Schock, whose llinois district is home to Caterpillar, spoke on the floor about the president’s speech to his constituents and their telling response. Caterpillar has been a central part of Obama’s stimulus pitch the past couple of days, but the pitch has been bumbled, as the rest of the stimulus message has been. Obama claimed the Caterpillar CEO told him he’d be rehiring some of his 22,000 laid-off workers as soon as the stimulus bill was passed, but Owens later flatly contradicted the President’s claim. Schock’s constituents were urged by the president himself to tell Schock to vote “yes,” but he was not approached by one constituent, Caterpillar employee or otherwise, asking him to support the stimulus. Democrats can pass this monstrosity because they control both houses, but they should never get away with painting criticism of it as unreasonable or purely partisan. Criticism comes from every quarter- even from laid-off workers who are subject to an onslaught of the president’s patented Promises of an Implausible Nature and Grandiloquence of Economic Gloom:
Video is here:
Update: When asked about Schock’s floor speech and “no” vote, the White House responds by calling him a political hack for for voting in line with both his principles and his constituents.
What Gibbs ignores is that Schock’s anecdote is a reflection of just how deep the skepticism of the stimulus runs among regular Americans who have no political motivations. It’s not something Obama’s team wants to admit because it would require conceding that the fault lies almost entirely with him for losing control of the process and message. He was a president with a 70-percent approval rating tasked with getting a Democratic-controlled Congress to spend a bunch of money without vociferous objection from utterly politically neutered Republicans. He failed, and in doing so, he “brought publicity to the skunk.” The people of Peoria are not jockeying for reelection or fund raising off of their opposition. They’ve got the extremely popular president of the United States standing right in front of them, promising that their jobs will come back and money will be put in their pockets if they’ll just tell Rep. Aaron Schock to vote “yes” on one bill. By all rights, those folks should have been scrambling to the stage to admonish Schock for his opposition. And, yet they didn’t. According to Schock, there’s been much more scrambling to thank him for his “no” votes. His constituents are acting against interest, which makes their testimony all the more convincing. I’m sure Thomas Frank is right now putting together a proposal for another condescending, out-of-touch examination of Middle Americans entitled, “Seriously, What’s the Matter With Peoria? It’s as Bad as Kansas.” The people of Illinois, even the aggressively wooed Caterpillar constituents, are uncertain about the bill, probably for a combination of reasons. Maybe because Joe Biden said there was a 30 percent chance it would go badly even under perfect circumstances. Maybe because Obama’s promises don’t amount to much when the CEO of Caterpillar refutes them a day later. Maybe it’s because they know the final version of the bill went up online just 12 hours before the House started talking about voting on it. Or, because even though Obama said the bill had no earmarks in it, they heard Charles Schumer call the bill amendments “porky.” It could be that the idea of spending the equivalent of $1 million a day from the day Christ was born until today is a little much for them to stomach. Maybe they saw Nancy Pelosi argue for the bill, even just one time. Maybe they heard the problem with bipartisanship wasn’t on the Republican side. Maybe they even heard that from a Democrat. Could it be that talk of accountability rings hollow after the first $350 billion of TARP was shown to have been frittered away in unseemly ways under the direction of Obama’s tax-cheating Secretary of Treasury? They might be worried the government will run out of money, or convinced they can handle the economy better than Congress, or honestly think more tax cuts will stimulate before spending does. But no, for the Obama administration, it’s none of those things. It’s that a congressman from Illinois is looking at the bill through the wrong “lens.” Schock could look at this thing through a kaleidoscope, and it wouldn’t hide the the mistakes in the bill or the mistakes the administration made selling it.
