What Obama Did And Didn’t Say

The words Obama used most last night:

Beinart was struck by how little the president mentioned the deficit:

Last night, instead of devoting paragraph after paragraph to America’s debt, Obama quickly doffed his cap to the importance of “bringing down our deficit in a balanced way,” and then pivoted hard. Now that congress had “finally produced a budget,” he declared, politicians were “freer to focus on creating new jobs.” And that’s exactly what Obama did. He didn’t just devote more time to subjects he had touched in on years past: making pre-K universal, raising the minimum wage, supporting manufacturing, building an infrastructure for clean energy. More importantly, he didn’t undermine those calls, either rhetorically or substantively, by also promising to freeze or slash government spending. It was as if the politics of austerity had suddenly ceased to exist.

He sees this decision as “yet more evidence that the Democratic Party is moving left”:

Instead of merely being the party that does austerity more humanely, Democrats from Bill de Blasio to Elizabeth Warren to now Obama himself are arguing unapologetically for expanding government in order to expand prosperity to those Americans who haven’t experienced it.