The Dish

MG Siegler counters my sense of disappointment with the iPad:

The iPhone and the iPod touch have in a way served as training wheels for us to use this new type of device, the iPad. To a lesser extent, so have Apple’s multi-touch trackpads and the new multi-touch Magic Mouse. All of these devices are pointing towards what Apple obviously believes is the future of computing: touch. That is more clear now than ever before — the iPad is their biggest step yet.

Larison counters Douthat:

Obviously much depends on whether or not unemployment remains as high as it is, but not only did Reagan recover from the setbacks in the ‘82 midterms amid similarly high unemployment, but he went on to win one of the most lopsided presidential elections in American history two years later. Regardless of economic conditions, I would be very wary of assuming that the public will act in a certain way over two years from now. Much will depend on the quality of the candidate the GOP nominates, and just as much will depend on the perceived economic improvement between now and then that the incumbent will claim as his own.

Chait thought the speech dull but necessary:

For most of the last year, liberals have been berating the administration for things that weren’t its fault. Rhetoric and “leadership” can only go so far in the face of structural realities – Obama can’t turn Ben Nelson into a liberal. But we’ve finally reached a moment where these intangible qualities do matter. The Democratic Party has been verging on total breakdown, and the administration has wilted in the face of the challenge. Stemming the Democratic panic was the primary task of this speech. We’ll soon see if it succeeded. I’d bet that it did.

Chris Buckley was stirred:

Tonight Mr. Obama proved—once again—that he hears the American music and can play it like a maestro. As well as Ronald Reagan. Both presidents had—have—have music in their souls. The other people in the room where I watched the speech were in tears by the end—the kind that stream down the face. I managed to hold those back. But I could not hold back my admiration at the performance, in particular of Mr. Obama’s deep humanity, as evinced by his profound, almost Lincolnesque humor. Oh dear, are tears streaming down my face, one way or the other?

Douthat still has questions:

As for health care — well, I’m still not sure what to make of the health care section, which seemed too tepid if the White House is still hoping to pass the legislation as it is, and too combative if they want to explore a smaller and more bipartisan bill. Yesterday Ezra Klein suggested that the White House has acted confused and uncertain on health care because it is confused and uncertain. Nothing in tonight’s speech dispelled that perception — and presidential uncertainty can’t be a good thing for the legislation’s prospects

James Surowiecki was impressed:

Most important, it placed jobs at the heart of the speech, which is where they belong, both politically and in terms of policy. And it was good to see Obama do this without being obviously or stridently populist. After the speech, a couple of pundits described Obama’s opening reference to hating the bank bailout as a call to arms, but it didn’t come off like that at all. Instead, it seemed like a honest statement of fact: everyone hates the bailouts, but they had to be done. And what followed was right on point: what matters now is not vengeance, but repayment (the bank tax) and substantive reform, so that the bailouts don’t happen again. This felt like Obama at its best: acknowledging people’s anger and the justice of it, but always drawing the discussion back to rational, pragmatic grounds.

Ezra Klein wants action:

Obama made a strong statement in favor of health-care reform, but he didn't call on the House to pass the Senate bill, or the Senate to pass modifications, or for any alternative path to be followed. Success here will be measured not in reactions to the speech, but in the outcome of the effort. So too with the section on the economy, which sounded convincing, but will matter a lot less than the unemployment rate eight months from now.

Yglesias thought Obama was right to not get specific on health care:

The speech is a speech to the American people, especially to people who follow politics pretty casually, and regular people don’t want to hear about congressional process. The reality is that this is going to have to be worked out behind the scenes, behind the dread closed doors. But one of the main points of the speech was to get the focus on Obama and Obama’s themes and off closed door dealmaking. So he emphasized the need for action and correctly situated the call for health reform in a broader context of economics reform.

And Blumenthal rounds up the insta-polls.

"[W]hen the people give way, their deceivers, betrayers, and destroyers press upon them so fast, that there is no resisting afterwards. The nature of the encroachment upon the American Constitution is such as to grow every day more and more encroaching. … The people grow less steady, spirited, and virtuous, the seekers more numerous and more corrupt, and every day increases the circles of their dependents and expectants, until virtue, integrity, public spirit, simplicity, and frugality become the objects of ridicule and scorn, and vanity, luxury, foppery, selfishness, meanness, and downright venality swallow up the whole society," – John Adams, as cited by Jim Sleeper.

"Those of us in public office can respond to this reality by playing it safe and avoid telling hard truths. We can do what's necessary to keep our poll numbers high and get through the next election instead of doing what's best for the next generation.

But I also know this: If people had made that decision 50 years ago or 100 years ago or 200 years ago, we wouldn't be here tonight. The only reason we are is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard, to do what was needed even when success was uncertain, to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and grandchildren," – Barack Obama, last night.

My foreboding sense is that America may have already passed the point of no return in terms of civil, constitutional governance. I do not believe that in the Bush administration, the United States was effectively governed by its Constitution. The forms were still there, but the reality wasn't. Beneath it all, the desire for despotism ran, fueled by the despot's greatest ally, fear. Fear of foreigners, fear of terrorists, fear of gays, fear of immigrants, fear of the inevitable uncertainties of real reform.

It was entrenched by the military's own embrace of the role of imperial adventure, by the CIA's embrace of torture, by the president's assertion of total, extra-legal power in a never-ending war that now encompassed the US as well as abroad and citizens alongside non-citizens, and by a resurgent, right-wing partisan media that saw its job as fomenting propaganda rather than seeking any kind of truth, and liberal mainstream media so afraid of its own shadow and so intimidated by accusations of elitism that it became the equivalent of Harry Reid.

And I share Sleeper's deep dismay at the myopic, callow crowd in this capital city, more obsessed with passing instant phony judgments on political fortunes than with addressing with seriousness the vast challenges this struggling and ailing and now fast-declining republic faces.

I've lived in Washington for twenty years. I saw in Obama the real hope that something constructive could emerge from the corruption and decline of the recent past. I saw last night the civil tone that marks a responsible politics, rather than the glib cynicism and mock heroism that has marked us in much of the new millennium.

I saw in the civic spirit – especially among the young – a means of renewal for the republic. And I remain convinced that those who want to "reset" Obama's agenda to the old forms with which they are comfortable have waged a take-no-prisoners war on real change and real reform.

So this fever feels to me like either the kind that precedes the final death of this republic into a carnival of FNC-directed war and debt and drama led by charismatic media-emperors or empresses – or the fever that finally ends the sickness, and restores some sense of civic responsibility and republican virtue. Last night, I saw one of the few men left able to see the depth of the crisis and not lose faith in this country's ability to overcome it. My faith in this country – so strong in the past – is not as strong as Obama's now.

But I sure as hell believe in fighting for it, and for him, against the forces at home and abroad that would truly end this experiment in self-government while pretending, of course, that everything is exactly the same. I believe our crisis is deeper than many now believe – because it is not just a crisis of economics, of debt, of over-reach, of an empire now running on its own steam and unstoppable by any political force,  but because it is a crisis of civic virtue, a collapse of the good faith and serious, reasoned attention to problems that marks the distinction between a republic and a bread-and-circuses Ailes-Rove imperium.

Those, in my view, are the stakes. Are you ready to get back into the arena and fight? And if you don't, who will?

When McCain feels the need to release a statement against gays in the military. Ackerman fumes:

There is not a single argument for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell that does not reduce to either bigotry or acquiescence to bigotry. Neither is worthy of the American promise. I never thought of McCain as a bigot until I saw how willing he was to traffic in bigotry during his presidential bid. Imagine my horror at seeing it fester after he lost his race.

We have learned so much about McCain these past few years: a man whose cynicism allowed him to acquiesce to the CIA using the exact same torture methods once used on him; whose recklessness goaded him to foist an unbalanced ignoramus as a potential president in a time of great crisis at home and abroad; whose bitterness is exceeded only by Joe Lieberman’s; and who sickeningly exploited his own years as a POW to gin up votes. He’s as hollow a man as you’re likely to find in Washington – and that’s a very high bar.

A reader writes:

I was watching the J.D. Hayworth interview on "Hardball" last night too, and while that is a great quote, I think you missed an even better one.  I don't remember the exact phrasing (I'm sure your crack research team can look it up), but Hayworth was attacking McCain for opposing torture – enhanced interrogation tactics, excuse me – when Matthews asked him if waterboarding was torture.  Hayworth attempted to defend himself by saying that we waterboard our own soldiers, so therefore waterboarding is not torture.  Matthews came back at him with the all-too-logical point that we waterboard our own soldiers to train them about what torture might be like at the hands of the enemy. Hayworth proceeded to ask Matthews something along the lines of "how come we don't behead our own soldiers to train them to withstand it at the hands of Islamo-fascists?"  You really need to listen to that part of the segment to fully understand the crazy that is J.D. Hayworth.

The relevant segment begins at the 3:00 mark, after the jump:

We'll see. My instant reaction was:

This was not a firm commitment to the Senate bill. It was an opening for more debate; and an invitation to let the GOP to contribute, which, of course, they won't. It just passes the test of resolution I laid out earlier today. But not much more.

Upon reflection, his emphasis on the real human need out there and his insistence on its deficit neutrality seemed to me to be exactly the right emphases for addressing the public. As for Congress? The morale boost might certainly help prod the House – and Obama's constant praise of the House was also code, it seemed to me. Sprung strikes a similar tone:

Could have been worse. He defended the broad outlines of the bill eloquently, and per preview, said he would not walk away and that Congress has to find a way. But he did not say how. There was the gesture/invitation to bipartisanship I anticipated, but it seemed designed merely to put Republicans on the defensive. His prescription pointed toward the House passing the Senate bill without calling for it. Will he now help to drive Democrats that way?  Jury's still out.

Pareene gives the most persuasive thumbs-up I think:

Here's the brilliance of the jobs focus: an incoming president's first address to a joint session (his pseudo-SOTU) can be lofty and grand and all that bullshit. And it would've been insane for Obama to have hammered on job creation in that first address, because every economist in the nation knew we were going to shed a zillion jobs over the next year. Obviously the stimulus should've been larger, and a supplemental stimulus should've been passed last year when it became apparent that the one passed was not large enough, but from a purely political standpoint, to announce your job creation plan in the trough of a major recession is just setting yourself up to be blamed when the jobs continue doing what jobs do in a recession. To bring your Presidential focus back around to it now, when the worst is hopefully behind us, is a nice bit of maneuvering.

He actually focused on health care more than we expected him to, and while some were hoping he was going to explicitly say "I call on the House to pass the Senate Bill and I call on the Senate to amend their bill through reconciliation," that is actually the sort of thing he should save for his sessions with congressional leaders. Reminding the public that the bill will regulate the insurers and be deficit-neutral was way more helpful for the cause than explaining his plan to ram it through an unfriendly congress.

"So, it finally got around to that time of the month for the product's launch, and it turns out that the iPad can't handle periodicals. I guess the folks who had hoped it could cope with their 24-hour news cycle are especially disappointed," – a commenter at Gawker.

My own take is underwhelmed.

If newspapers and magazines were hoping for a miracle, it seems to me they were let down. Jobs barely mentioned them. As an e-Book reader, the iPad lacks the smaller size of the Kindle, and it just doesn't look to me as if it's something you can easily hold in your hands and read. Maybe I'll change my mind when I actually get to use one. It's very hard to tell from a distance.

Then there's the real problem: AT&T. I've found the reliability of my iPhone beyond frustrating. One out of three calls gets dropped even in a well-served metropolitan area. And if I really want to browse the web, I've learned that the iPhone is by far the least efficient way of doing so. Everything takes an age to load even on 3G; it feels like dial-up AOL much of the time. It's fine for quick catch-ups on email and some of the apps are way cool. But this does indeed look like a big iTouch.

I want one, of course. But I'm pretty sure I don't need one.

Bob Gates applauded the commitment to remove the gay ban in the military. The defense chiefs didn't and stayed in their seats. We're told that that's protocol: the military is not supposed to take sides in these policy debates. So why did they all stand up and applaud when Obama warned Iran of "growing consequences"?