It amazes me that my normally astute readers didn’t catch the brilliant thing the President did. You guys are losing your touch!
In the speech (and the trick is that you had to hear the speech because it isn’t in the written version) the President basically threw down a gauntlet at the Democrats. Not one major media source I read or watched today caught it, or if they did, they didn’t point it out.
In answers to at least three different questions, the President said something akin to the following:
This is my vision. If anyone has any alternative ideas, I’m more than open to hear them.
What you don’t realize is that that very idea, that the President has a vision and is willing to listen to others’ visions, is the key to understanding how disorganized the Democrats are.
As I stated on a prior post:
…at some point the Democratic Party, is going to have to stand for something other than standing for “whatever the Republicans don’t stand for.”
The President pointed exactly that out to the Democrats last night.
In the main issues that the President discussed, we have heard nothing from the mouth of Democrats. When Bill Clinton said that Social Security as it stood (in 1998) was not viable, every single Democrat head nodded in agreement. Now, in 2005, we’re being told it’s not in danger and it’s a fabrication of the Bush administration to make people on Wall Street rich, despite the fact that it isn’t true.
The Democrats have jumped in front of any camera willing to watch (re: every camera) and parroted the same claim; that private accounts are going to make Wall Street folks rich.
As with most other things the Democrats say, it’s not even true, and nobody has ever called them on it. According to Factcheck.org (a favorite source of libs when it suits their purposes):
New information turned up by FactCheck.org shows that the type of private Social Security accounts being proposed by President Bush would yield very little profit to the securities industry, contrary to persistent claims of a potentially huge “windfall” to Wall Street.
What we have discovered is that the model for Bush’s accounts — the Federal Thrift Savings Plan for federal workers — actually paid securities firms a net total of only 16 cents for every $10,000 in workers accounts. The TSP had refused to make that information public — until now. It shows that fees actually being paid to Wall Street are hundreds of times smaller than some critics had assumed.
For that reason and others we find that ads run in Louisiana by the liberal Democratic group Campaign for America’s Future are grossly misleading. The group is accusing Republican Rep. James McCrery, who is chairman of the Social Security subcommittee and a supporter of Bush’s private accounts, of “corruption” for accepting campaign donations from Wall Street, which it falsely claims will “profit most” from private accounts.
In other words, the unchallenged claim that the new accounts would create a windfall for Wall Street are lies.
Bush was smart, though. Instead of pointing out this blatant hypocrisy and getting into a pissing contest with the Washington Press Corps, 80% of whom vote down-the-line-Democrat, he just challenged the opposition to come up with an alternative.
He did the same with the energy bill.
In other words, he hung it out there and asked the critics to be more than opposition. He asked them to think, for once. If you’d like a more poignant example, think of all the programs John “I Have a Plan” Kerry has proposed since he got his butt handed to him this election. Namely, how many bills have been sponsored by the man who “had a plan” for America. The man who was going to change everything. The uniter. The great hope for the future of America.
How many bills? Initiatives? Anything?
Zero.
John Kerry has proposed nothing. Ted Kennedy has proposed nothing (although its rumored he’s still mourning the failure of Oldsmobile). Hillary Clinton? Nothing. Chuck “No Votes In My Lifetime” Schumer? Nothing. All the leadership combined in the Democratic party have offered nothing.
The President called them on their “criticize everything” strategy.
That, dear friends, is the brilliant part of his speech. The ball is in the critics’ court, only the President is playing football, and they’re all playing jax.