He did an excellent job articulating his messages, he showed emotion, and he did effective combat against a lot of the anti-intellectual ideas that the opposition has been throwing up recently.
I predict that his new for-the-people offense will prove successful in passing the jobs for america act. The question is, did he write enough oomph into it to provide an effective-enough boost to the economy to ensure his re-election? I'm curious to hear Paul Krugman's analysis of what the macroeconomic effect of this bill is likely to be...
Still, I suppose that the bottom line with regard to Obama's reelection will involve many more variables than just the degree of success of this bill.
For instance, the surface transportation reauthorization bill will be another upcoming opportunity to inject massive amounts of funding into capital infrastructure improvements, which have large job-creating capabilities... This will be thus another good opportunity for Obama to exert leadership and use the bully pulpit to fight for large expenditures on transit and bike/ped, which are proven to generate large numbers of relative jobs per dollar spent.
So, here's to hoping that Obama's new fighting spirit will hold, prove effective and be put to good use!
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