And dominate he did. Monday, he gave a rousing pro-worker Labor Day speech, Wednesday he gave a rousing speech on the economy, and Friday he held the first press conference he's held in months. Finally, the White House seems to have woken up and realized that "overexposure" of a president is a myth propagated by those who oppose him. The "bully pulpit" is there to be used, in other words, not there to gather dust until Fox News decides it is OK for the president to speak to the public.

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President Obama may be on the verge of a significant announcement -- the nomination of Elizabeth Warren to head the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This is pure conjecture on my part, I have to admit right up front. But politically, it would indeed give the president a boost right when he needs it most, heading into the midterm election season.

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President Barack Obama gave a wowser of a speech today. In it, he signaled that he's completely over his obsession with chasing the non-existent pipe dream of bipartisanship from Republicans. Obama dove into the 2010 election season fray with this speech, and appeared much more like the "Candidate Obama" that so many of his supporters have been missing for so long. In a speech that was touted as an announcement of a legislative package to get the economy moving faster, Obama not only rolled out his economic ideas, but also did a better job of defining the Democratic narrative than he's done in quite a while.

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The play is unabashedly Leftist, in the classic meaning of the term. It tells two parallel stories of factories facing shutdowns, and the possibilities open to them; one from modern-day San Francisco and one from a few years ago in Argentina, and it manages to link these two stories in a very personal way through the lead female character.

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Jollification aside, though, we're still one week away from Congress returning to briefly do their job (or at least give the appearance of doing so), before they award themselves another month or so off, in order to campaign. Labor Day is right around the corner (or perhaps blowing past the corner at 75 miles per hour, if you live in the hurricane zone -- which contains, my television assures me, everything east of about Denver).

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But politics isn't social science, where causality must be rigorously proven. Politics is, to be blunt, whatever you can get away with saying to the voters. Think not B.F. Skinner, but rather P.T. Barnum, in other words. "Event X happened because party Y passed legislation Z" is an expected statement from a politician, on any subject under the sun. Call it "spin" if you will, but a large part of it lies in convincing the American public that you have a right to claim credit because of your policies.

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Obama struck a rather humble tone in his remarks, which seemed just about right for the situation. He didn't go out of his way to either claim personal credit, or point the finger of blame. He even included President Bush, by name, in his remarks, after phoning him earlier today.

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The big fight this election season hasn't really dawned yet. And all the issues in the past will likely pale in comparison to the big fight that's just ahead of us. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (to his credit) set up this fight, right before the midterm election's homestretch. The big fight this year is going to be over extending the Bush tax cuts to the wealthiest two percent of American workers, and to the top three percent of American small businesses. On the other side are, respectively, ninety-eight percent of American workers, and ninety-seven percent of American small businesses. Not bad odds, even for Democrats.

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We're going to take a cartoon break today, because I have not just one but actually two cartoons waiting in the wings from C.W. Cunningham. I'm going to post them separately here, because the second one needs its own title. The first shows a different perspective of an earlier cartoon.
Enjoy!
-- Chris Weigant
 

About the [...]

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The answer, as with all things Tea Party, is (once again): "it's hard to be sure." We won't really know until after the midterm elections, and at that point so much "spin" will be on the airwaves one might (if one grew up in Kansas, for the sake of argument) be excused the immediate impulse to run for the tornado shelter in the backyard. In other words, even after the elections, the answer is going to depend on who is doing the answering.

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