Now that Barack Obama has announced that he’ll be releasing a jobs plan, talkers on the right are winding down a long season of debt and budget debates in which it seemed people could not be reminded enough that Obama had not put forth any plan of his own. The day he releases his plan (campaign literature though it may be), he will pull the rug out from under that whole chorus.
Sure it was instructive to note as a matter of process that the Republican House proposed and proposed and the Democrats merely disposed, but that’s hardly the take-home message and it’s not even particularly well-suited to the purpose of deflecting accusations that conservatives were ‘embracing extremism’.
The test is this: if Obama did have a plan, would that satisfy us? Of course not. And it’s not that we have some irrational need to attack him, but because we basically do know what his approach to the issues is and we know that we have better solutions. The problem with telling people our objection is to the lack of a plan is that it doesn’t express that bottom line: that his plans are based on all the wrong assumptions.
We only have so many terms for growing government or incentivizing businesses and it’s natural to want a new pointed statement to make that ties in to current news, especially when you have the chance to go on TV, but most of the voting (and working) Americans who have lives to juggle outside Washington aren’t going to do background research on your segment to tie process to policy and determine where they stand.
People aren’t stupid but they are busy, so at the risk of sounding like a broken record don’t forget to make the talking points serve the point. We have a superior vision than the left, and we should never forget to say so.
