Obama Contributes to the Noise (Part II - The Not So Good)

This is the second half of the review of President Obama's commencement address at the University of Michigan this past Saturday. The first half is here, and the text of the speech is here.

Ok, so I still think that on the whole Obama's speech was fantastic, but there are two glaring flaws, one of which I'd like to just note - his hypocrisy on our democracy, and the other of which this post is primarily about - the false equivalence between right and left. After that, there's one more side point I'd like to address - the lack of even a mention of other problems with the media - particularly with respect to race.

Obama's Still Got It (Part I - The Good)

(updated below)

Yesterday, President Obama gave the commencement address at Michigan, and I immediately realized that a) I was basically the only law student that didn't see it (I was at a friend's wedding - congrats again Johnny and Jen!), b) it was worth the hours of waiting in line, and c) it was a speech that could have been designed just for me (I was told so by several friends). So I read through it, and I almost began tearing up and couldn't stop smiling, except in the points where I wanted to yell out that he's being a hypocrite. And again, this was just while I was reading (full text here). But I've also seen enough of his speeches that I could recreate the delivery in my own head. Anyway, given my varied and strong reactions to his address, I figured I'd write about the different parts. This post is incredibly long, so I'll write here about the good, and about the bad separately.

Post-partisanship in the wake of health care reform

Today you'll hear lots of post-mortem analysis of the health care reform debate. Some of this talk will be about the "death of post-partisanship." Don't be fooled: post-partisanship was dead a long time ago and it wasn't Obama who killed it.

David Sanger writes of the passage of health care reform that

[I]n the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a 'post-partisan' Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering."

Sanger is mistaken.