Obama at the GOP House Issues Conference

In case you missed it, President Obama spoke for around an hour at the GOP House Issues Conference, and it seemed surprisingly calm. For the most part, everyone conducted themselves rather well; the truth was… hit or miss, but it was still a night and day difference from what the health care debates of last summer looked like in the mob-rule town hall meetings with Republicans screaming into an empty void.

Some of my favorite quotes from Obama, emphasis added:

You know, Mike, I’ve read your legislation. I mean, I take a look at this stuff — and the good ideas we take. But here’s — here’s the thing — here’s the thing that I guess all of us have to be mindful of, it can’t be all or nothing, one way or the other. And what I mean by that is this: If we put together a stimulus package in which a third of it are tax cuts that normally you guys would support, and support for states and the unemployed, and helping people stay on COBRA that your governors certainly would support — Democrat or a Republican; and then you’ve got some infrastructure, and maybe there’s some things in there that you don’t like in terms of infrastructure, or you think the bill should have been $500 billion instead of $700 billion or there’s this provision or that provision that you don’t like. If there’s uniform opposition because the Republican caucus doesn’t get 100 percent or 80 percent of what you want, then it’s going to be hard to get a deal done. That’s because that’s not how democracy works.

So I mean, I think we can score political points on the basis of the fact that we underestimated how severe the job losses were going to be. But those job losses took place before any stimulus, whether it was the ones that you guys have proposed or the ones that we proposed, could have ever taken into effect. Now, that’s just the fact, Mike, and I don’t think anybody would dispute that. You could not find an economist who would dispute that.