Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous,” Winston Churchill is purported to have remarked in 1920. A dissenting opinion was to come several years later from Will Rogers, America’s favorite good ol’ boy country philosopher, who famously suggested that “all politics is applesauce.”
Anyone who tuned in to CNN Wednesday to watch President Barack Obama’s speech before a partisan audience in Cleveland got a taste of both war and applesauce.
The hint of partisan warfare was evident in the president calling out House Republican leader Rep. John Boehner of Ohio eight times — pointedly, on Boehner’s home turf — for exploiting the public’s frustration and anger in an apparent Republican plan to “ride this fear and anger all the way to Election Day.” Boehner had dissed the Obama administration in an earlier speech, also in Cleveland, in which he presented the Republican assessment of the state of the economy.
A healthy portion of political applesauce was served up when Obama spoke of the America of his youth, “where you didn’t buy things you couldn’t afford; where we just didn’t think about today — we thought about tomorrow.” One could fairly hear Republicans across the land snorting at the irony, since one of their prevailing raps against the man is that he enjoys spending taxpayer money to buy things the country can’t afford, unmindful of the cost to future generations.
The speech was billed as an address about the economy, but in a copy that the White House press office distributed by e-mail, it is not the stuff about the economy that leaps off the page to hijack the reader’s attention. Rather, it is Obama’s sentiment concerning such things as the status of a small-business jobs bill that is currently being held up by Republicans in the Senate.
“Look, I recognize that most of the Republicans in Congress have said no to just about every policy I’ve proposed since taking office. And on some issues, I realize it’s because there are genuine philosophical differences,” he told the crowd. “But on issues like this one, the only reason they’re holding this up is politics, pure and simple. They’re making the same calculation they made just before the inauguration: If I fail, they win. Well, they might think this will get them where they need to go in November, but it won’t get our country where it needs to go in the long run.”
At this point, audience members began a ritual of periodically leaping from their seats to applaud the presidential lines, in the manner of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s memorable pop-up performance at Obama’s State of the Union speech last winter.
“You didn’t elect me to just read the polls and figure out how to keep myself in office. You didn’t elect me to avoid big problems. You elected me to do what’s right. And as long as I’m president, that’s exactly what I’ll do,” he promised, and the crowd was on its feet again.
Its promotion as a speech about the economy notwithstanding, if this baby was not your basic Class A stemwinder of a political campaign speech, designed to fire up the Democratic base in advance of the November election, I’ll eat all nine single-spaced pages. Not that things would be otherwise in a reversal of roles, with Republicans in danger of losing control of the House of Representatives and a Republican president under heavy pressure to rally the troops.
In a speech earlier in the week, Obama joked that his opponents treat him worse than they would a dog. His performance on Wednesday is an indication that the big dog — rather than remain on the porch, snoozing disinterestedly above the fray — intends to bound down the steps on occasion to nip at the heels of his tormentors.
As debates go, a continuing Obama-Boehner skirmish may not be the latter-day equivalent of Lincoln-Douglass. But absent some earthshaking “October surprise” to divert the attention of voters and mess up the polls that predict substantial Republican gains in Congress, it may be all we have for entertainment on the way to the November elections.
Fifty-two days and counting. Applesauce, anyone?
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may contact him by e-mail at olddawg@bangordailynews.com.