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The Rebuttal the Republicans Should Give Tomorrow Posted: 07 Sep 2011 09:36 AM PDT When the President stands before America Thursday night, on national television, and introduces us to his plan to spend several hundred billion dollars that our children will have to pay off because there’s no way in heck we’ll get to it by the time we pay down the trillions of dollars we already owe, he’ll do so without an answer from the GOP. Mark Knoller reported that Speaker John Boehner will not attempt a rebuttal to the speech but instead will allow his fellow Congressional Republicans to do whatever rebuttal they feel necessary on their own. And that is how you lead America in a time of economic misery. Who needs a simple unified message to counter the “spend it all and let the Chinese sort it out” plans of the President and the Democratic Party? I’m no genius, and I certainly don’t have the ear of any member of Congress, but the Speaker will miss a chance to deliver a powerful message that would require only about five minutes of airtime and some setup in advance. The core of the message is simple. The first stimulus was a colossal failure, a payoff to the President’s union donors, and a waste of money that could have gone toward the employment of millions of Americans in businesses all over the country. The Democrats, not content to admit failure and do the right thing for the country, want to do the whole thing again. Now that’s a pretty standard rebuttal and I’ll wager that a few dozen GOP lawmakers will say those very things in a few dozen boring press releases you’ll never see. However, I had a bit of a different idea for how Republicans should deliver the message. Here’s the setup. The camera shows a room, like a den or a living room. The football game is on the television (probably the pre-show, but not necessarily, as we’ll see later). There are two guys whose backs are to the camera, wearing gear from the two teams — the New Orleans Saints and the Green Bay Packers — playing that night. We can hear them talking football, maybe laughing a little. They’re at ease. When they turn around, we see the two men are Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana. Their message is quick. The idea is to be done in five minutes, give or take a minute. The Governors would trade lines and simply talk to America. The idea the GOP should project is one of casual confidence with a very slight undercurrent of irritation from the Governors that they have to interrupt game night to rebut a Presidential speech he could have given at any time in the past several months. JINDAL: I’m Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and this is my friend and fellow Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin. We won’t take up much of your time tonight, because we’re as eager to get to the game as you are. Here’s all we want to say. We’re glad the President finally got around to our jobs situation, but we wish he had come to us first. You see, under the President’s guidance, national unemployment is over 9 percent. In our states, it’s less than 7.5. WALKER: We created jobs the old-fashioned way. We got government out of the way so all of you use your creativity and skill to do what needed done. That is the right way, the way that works. That is the Republican way. JINDAL: Obviously, the President thinks he knows better. Again. His plan is the same stimulus junk that has kept so many of you from good jobs. WALKER: He promised unemployment wouldn’t go higher than 8 percent. He was wrong. His trillion-dollar stimulus failed. JINDAL: We’re not inclined to waste more of you hard-earned money to give him another chance and we don’t think you want that either. WALKER: The Republican plan is simple and, as Bobby and I have proven, effective: Get government out of your way so you can do what you do best — create, innovate, prosper, excel. JINDAL: If you’ll help us, we will get rid of a lot of the regulations that make it so expensive and complicated to start a business, even at home. We’ll make the tax code simpler, flatter, and easier. WALKER: We’ll be responsible and certain with our proposals so that you’ll know what we’re doing, and how much they’ll cost. We won’t run out a new half-cooked scheme every few months, confident that this time we have the right genius solution. JINDAL: We’ll make sure Social Security and Medicare are still around in twenty years because it’s important to us that we have a secure and smart safety net for our elderly. We won’t play silly political games while those programs collapse. WALKER: That’s it. We just want to do what we know works. We hope the President will listen to us. And now, Go Pack! JINDAL: Wait…Go Saints! WALKER: Packers! JINDAL: SAINTS! [Fade Out] That’s how I’d do the rebuttal. Now, I understand that the GOP would need to get Governors Walker and Jindal for a few hours. If they couldn’t meet in one place to do this, I’m sure if could be done in two different places, with the Governors on separate monitors, from their “football rooms”. The GOP could buy a few minutes of commercial time either before the game or, if the President runs close to game-time (which I expect he will), toward the beginning of half-time. Actually, half-time would be a better place for the rebuttal. The Governors could stress a little how inconvenient it is that they have to interrupt football night to rebut an intrusive and unnecessary speech and halftime would make a far better frame for that than a pre-game rebuttal. I’m sure it’ll cost the GOP a few dollars, but the return, I believe, will be worth the cost. It’ll probably be the best message the party delivers all year. The whole issue is moot, though, thank to Speaker Boehner’s reluctance to mount any sort of rebuttal at all. It’s a shame. It would have been fun to watch.

Clearing the Browser Tabs – Love the Man, Hate the Ad Wednesday Edition Posted: 07 Sep 2011 03:10 AM PDT I really like Herman Cain. I think he’d made a very good President. He has a knack for getting right to the heart of the matter, especially on matters of the economy and how it affects Americans, that the other candidates do not. He speaks with an air of authority gained from actual experience and many years as, well, an ordinary private citizen. We could do with a few more people like this in high office. On the other hand, this campaign ad his simply horrible. I see what his campaign tried to do, and the idea is a good one. It’s fresh and different and delivers a fairly standard campaign message in a way you don’t expect. The execution, however, is horrible. The ad is too long, the hokey “liberal” stuff in the beginning doesn’t work at all and the guy delivering the message is, well, a real jerk. Sure, I get that they wanted him to be the stereotypical spoiled actor type, but is that really the person you want to represent your candidate? The ending really doesn’t work either. I’m not sure what point it’s trying to make. The commercial might have worked. Certainly it’s creative enough to stand out. It just missed, badly. I really can’t knock Cain too hard for it, though. He’s in a position where he had to be unorthodox in order to get traction while the media continue to hype Jon Huntsman. He missed this one pretty badly, and for a campaign with as little margin for disaster as his, the miss might be fatal. The post for last night’s episode of The Delivery should be up later on today, and it will be a bit longer than usual. I’ve been so out of sorts this week that I realized only last night that I didn’t do a show post for Episode 109. I’ll include both shows in one post, so you’ll get a double dose of The Delivery. Who couldn’t like that? And now, links! Oh, no. Operation Fast and Furious isn’t the only example of this administration’s penchant to sabotage law enforcement and put weapons in the hands of criminals. It’s happened in Indiana and the destination for these guns appears to be Chicago. Mitt Romney released a 59-point economic plan yesterday that will, he says, bring unemployment below 6 percent by the end of his first term. That’s an awfully large claim and I like his boldness. On the other hand, I don’t like how much his economic advisers like Cap and Trade and energy taxes. Both of them are pure economy-killers. If you’re going to set an out of office e-mail when you go on vacation, this is the one to set. No one should be surprised that the bulk of the Post Office’s fiscal and personnel problems are caused union rules. Bob Belvedere wrote the best tribute post I’ve ever seen to commemorate one of Stacy McCain’s gonzo reporting trips. I’ve said it before, but Stacy doesn’t get nearly enough credit for the hard journalism he does, funded by donations and the occasional freelance piece. He should get calls every day from newspapers who want him to write for them. Politicians are hoarders? Yes, I can see that very clearly. They hoard power and our money and I do believe it’s time for an electoral intervention. I don’t like sponsored tweets and I’ve resisted a couple overtures to have them in my timelines. But, it seems that they do work, so maybe I’ll have to revisit my decisions. This is the worst economic chart I’ve seen in a couple months. The real employment situation is far worse than we realize and we are on the verge of a permanently-unemployed underclass unless we turn things around fairly soon. Since I was a bit out of blogging contact today, I missed my chance to give professional Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein a thumping for another wrong-headed economic post. Thankfully, RB at Big Journalism had my back. I consider Lisa Graas a friend of mine and I love that she leads with her faith when many, including me, do not. She’s written a thought-provoking post on why the social issues matter more than the fiscal in the coming Presidential race. I don’t agree with her conclusions, but her thoughts merit consideration.

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