Highlights from Romney's and Obama's speeches:
Unlike me, Howard Gleckman was unimpressed by Obama's speech yesterday:
Obama today delivered what was billed as a major economic speech. But, like Romney’s health talk, it was largely devoid of serious new ideas. Instead, the president seems to be running on a recycled version of last year’s stimulus proposal and echoes of his past budgets. You know the drill–subsidies for alternative energy, education, and basic research, modest new infrastructure spending, and tax cuts on firms that hire in the U.S. These ideas are not only old, they are small….
Yglesias asks how, exactly, Obama plans to get any of his proposals through Congress:
Unfortunately, far and away the least plausible portions of the speech were the ones where Obama tried to explain how re-electing him would lead to his vision becoming law. He's quite persuasive on the point that an Obama re-election would block Romney from doing various perhaps-objectionable things. But the idea that a second term for Obama will change the fact that 41 Republican Senators can and will filibuster any Obama ideas that they don't like (i.e., basically all of them) doesn't add up.
Mataconis is on the same page. Jamelle Bouie applauds Obama for portraying Romney as Bush III:
Campaign messages aren’t as important as we like to imagine, but to the extent that they are, this is much more effective than the attack on Bain Capital. The problem with Bain, and even the Massachusetts attacks, is that they are abstract. Most people have little experience with either private equity or Massachusetts, but everyone remembers the Bush years. To (accurately) tie Romney to his predecessor is to ask a question: "Why do we think these policies would work better this time?"
Ezra Klein thinks Romney needs to distance himself from Bush:
One speech doesn’t change an election, and this one won’t, either. But the Obama campaign’s line of attack does point to a difficulty for the Romney campaign in the coming months: Where can they show a sharp break with the policies of the Bush administration? Spending cuts, perhaps, but the more specific they get on what they’ll cut, the most voter opposition they face.
Ed Kilgore doesn't see how that's possible:
I particularly like his adoption of Bill Clinton’s line that Romney’s economic policies are Bush’s policies “on steroids.” Maybe if he repeats that a few hundred times, Team Mitt will finally have to explain exactly how its policies differ from those of Bush, and admit that it’s mainly a matter of even more regressive taxes and an assault on the New Deal and Great Society legacy that Bush could only dream about.
And Will Wilkinson thought the speech was too long:
[Obama's] meandering reflections on togetherness, the glory of big infrastructure projects, green industrial policy, and a tedious list of sundry nickel-and-dime initiatives seemed to me only to underscore that if he "doesn’t believe the government is the answer to all our problems", as he claims, that's only because he believes government is the answer to most of our problems and is splitting hairs. By the time he got around to the forced big finish, Mr Obama sounded more like the guy Mr Romney wants him to be than the sensible centrist he aimed to appear. Successful triangulation sometimes means knowing when to shut up.
The Dish 