After addressing her friends and colleagues who she said helped her win the Golden Globe for “Actress In A Leading Role – Mini-Series Or Television Movie” for her performance in Angels In America, Streep used her final minutes in front of the camera to attack two specific parts of President Bush’s speech. While not directly addressing Bush by name, Streep pointed out that there is a big problem in this country if the biggest problems in the country are committed couples in love "who want to spend the rest of their lives together." She went on to denounce the priority of focusing on getting professional sports players to stop taking steroids.
As you may recall if you watched the State of the Union Address, President Bush surprised most people by throwing in a paragraph about how he plans to get the professional sports players to stop using steroids because it sets a bad example. Critics have pointed out that Bush did little else in spelling out his plans for ensuring America a better future. Instead, he went on to announce his support for strengthening the institution of marriage by making sure it only applies to a relationship between a man and a woman, which critics have pointed out doesn’t lend itself to committed same-sex couples who would like to enjoy the same rights under the law. He even implied that he would lend his support to a Constitutional Amendment, if need be.
Obviously Streep wasn’t a big fan of President Bush’s priorities mentioned in his speech and she made that known on live television tonight.
Lately many people have been second-guessing the Obama administration’s political strategy. The conventional wisdom seems to be that President Obama tried to do too much — in particular, that he should have put health care on one side and focused on the economy. I disagree. The Obama administration’s troubles are the result not of excessive ambition, but of policy and political misjudgments. The stimulus was too small; policy toward the banks wasn’t tough enough; and Mr. Obama didn’t do what Ronald Reagan, who also faced a poor economy early in his administration, did — namely, shelter himself from criticism with a narrative that placed the blame on previous administrations…
Why was the stimulus underpowered? A number of economists [myself included] called for a stimulus substantially bigger than the one the administration ended up proposing. According to The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, however, in December 2008 Mr. Obama’s top economic and political advisers concluded that a bigger stimulus was neither economically necessary nor politically feasible…
The same can be said about policy toward the banks. Some economists defend the administration’s decision not to take a harder line on banks, arguing that the banks are earning their way back to financial health. But the light-touch approach to the financial industry further entrenched the power of the very institutions that caused the crisis, even as it failed to revive lending: bailed-out banks have been reducing, not increasing, their loan balances. And it has had disastrous political consequences: the administration has placed itself on the wrong side of popular rage over bailouts and bonuses.
Finally, about that narrative: It’s instructive to compare Mr. Obama’s rhetorical stance on the economy with that of Ronald Reagan. It’s often forgotten now, but unemployment actually soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cut. Reagan, however, had a ready answer for critics: everything going wrong was the result of the failed policies of the past. In effect, Reagan spent his first few years in office continuing to run against Jimmy Carter. Mr. Obama could have done the same — with, I’d argue, considerably more justice. He could have pointed out, repeatedly, that the continuing troubles of America’s economy are the result of a financial crisis that developed under the Bush administration, and was at least in part the result of the Bush administration’s refusal to regulate the banks…
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