Reaction to President Obama’s Speech (Updated)

I listened to President Obama’s speech last night. I didn’t think he did himself any harm with speech and may even have done himself some good.

To my ear it was at heart a laundry list as State of the Union speeches have increasingly become. It’s clear he genuinely believes in education and a change in energy policy as the keystones of his approach. I’ll comment on education in a separate post; I’ve commented on energy before: I think there are opportunities there but the real direction we need to take won’t be politically popular. The reforms we need would include less spending on roads rather than more, limiting the home mortgage deduction, re-emphasizing rail over highway transport, and so on. Most of the people who are qualified to do the major work on things like a smart grid already have jobs. Subsidizing that will raise their salaries but won’t create a lot of new jobs, at least not in the near term.

I didn’t think there were any particularly engaging insights in the speech. I didn’t learn anything from it. I wasn’t re-assured. On the other hand I wasn’t hostile to it, either. We’ll see how the American people reacted. Or if they were listening.

Update

Apparently, most people who listened to the speech were more favorably impressed by it than I was:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — A national poll indicates that two-thirds of those who watched President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night felt very good about his speech.

Sixty-eight percent of speech-watchers questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey said they had a very positive reaction, with 24 percent indicating that they had a somewhat positive response and 8 percent saying they had a negative reaction.

The audience watching his speech was not a perfect match with the nation’s breakdown by political party, presumably because the president is a Democrat. The speech audience questioned in the CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was about 8 to 10 points more Democratic than the general public.

Eighty-five percent of those polled said the president’s speech made them more optimistic about the direction of the country over the next few years, with 11 percent indicating the speech made them more pessimistic.

Eighty-two percent of speech-watchers said they support the economic plan Obama outlined in his prime time address, with 17 percent opposing the proposal.

That’s good. I think that a lot of the funk we’re in is psychological. Lack of “animal spirits”, I think the economists say. Not all, mind you. I realize that there are real people who have real problems as a consequence of the downturn.

I’ll try to get some more details on the actual poll and how many people actually watched the speech.

Update 2

Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen do a translation of the speech that I think is right on the money. Here’s a sample:

“So let there be no doubt: health care reform cannot wait, it must not wait, and it will not wait another year.”

TRANSLATION: Obama is doing health care reform this year, despite deficits and its high costs. There will be a lot of pressure – mainly from Republicans but also some centrist Democrats – to pay more attention to deficits after the recent spending spree. Obama will ignore them – and is in fact considering a push for near-universal coverage in the second half of this year.

Read the whole thing.

Update 3

And it looks like the market is reacting much as I did:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stocks fell on Wednesday as President Barack Obama’s first address to Congress shed little new light on how he plans to stabilize the economy and shore up banks, and gloomy home sales data fed the negative sentiment.

Obama said in his speech on Tuesday night the United States would emerge stronger from the ongoing crisis, but investors found little in what he said to spur buying after the market’s rebound on Tuesday from 1997 lows.

“He gave a very good speech in terms of making the citizens feel better about some of the things going on, but there is still a lot of work to be done,” said Tim Smalls, head of U.S. stock trading at brokerage Execution LLC in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The housing data “is another dose of reality,” he added.

Sales of previously owned U.S. homes plunged by a greater than expected 5.3 percent in January, an industry group reported.

I think we’re seeing yet another example of how some of us are living in a completely different world than others. For strongly partisan Democrats the speech was inspiring, transcendent, the first step on the path to a great new society. For strongly partisan Republican the speech was the devil’s excrement. For the rest of us it was SSDD.