Yesterday, the White House sent out a press notice saying that the president’s town hall discussion in Raleigh, North Carolina today would be “about the impact of skyrocketing cost of health care and the need for real reform…” Now, Obama is speaking, and he has decided to spend much of his introductory speech defending his efforts to deal with the recession, including the auto bailouts and, especially, the $787 billion stimulus bill, which Obama said was “without any of the earmarks that waste tax dollars on pet projects.” Obama also claims, as he has many times, that at the time the stimulus was passed, “there were some who thought doing nothing was somehow an option.” From the prepared text:
Now, there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the Recovery Act, so here are the facts. To date, roughly a quarter of the Recovery Act’s funding has been committed, over 30,000 projects have been approved, and thousands have been posted online, as part of an effort to uphold the highest standards of transparency and accountability when it comes to our economic recovery.
The speech seems a pretty clear indication that Republicans (and the polls) have put Obama on the defensive. A health care event has become in some significant part a stimulus defense event.
