Sunday Obama Roundup (excerpts, with video)

"The Ecstasy and the Agony" (Frank Rich-NY Times):

Among the highlights of Obama’s triumphant speech was his own populist jeremiad about the “fancy drapes” and private jets of Wall Street. But talk is not action. Two days later, as ABC News reported, the president of taxpayer- supported Bank of America took a private jet to New York to stonewall Andrew Cuomo’s inquest into $3.6 billion of suspect bonuses.

Handing more public money to the reckless banks that invented this culture and stuck us with the wreckage is the new third rail of American politics. If Obama doesn’t forge a better plan, neither his immense popularity nor even political foes as laughable as Jindal can insulate him from getting burned.

"Obama's Plan Is About Dreams, Not Dollars" (Will Bunch-Huff Po):

Make no mistake, Obama believes in honest accounting and he seems sincere about sharply reducing the deficit once our economic crisis has passed. But inherently he knows that it in a weird kind of way it may not matter a great deal in the long run if the deficit is $500 billion or $10 trillion, that America is worthless without our capacity to dream, to set impossibly lofty goals and then achieve them. And why wouldn't he know that, since he knows that the dreams of another man, Dr. Martin Luther King, were so important in getting him to the position he is in now. Times change, issues change. We've been to the moon and we've marched slowly toward racial equality. But to be America, we will still all need to learn to dream, all over again.

"Obama Touts Budget at State of the Black Union" (The Caucus-NY Times:

Last year, when Barack Obama declined an invitation to attend the State of the Black Union conference, it seemed to reflect worse on Tavis Smiley, the host of the event, than on the then-candidate himself. This year, President Obama again chose not to attend the conference, but he did address the group via video on Friday. The White House has just released his prepared remarks.

Mr. Obama did not address the historic nature of his election, nor did he embark on the racial dialogue he called for in his landmark address in March. Rather, he used the opportunity to tout his budget by talking about how it would ease issues affecting Americans generally, but particularly the black community.
(snip)
At this point, it appears that any direct racial dialogue is more likely to be driven by Mr. Obama’s surrogates than by the president himself.

"Adm. Mullen: I Don't Know Where Obama Got War Cost Numbers" (Sam Stein-HuffPo with video-01:36):

Vowing to fight Barack Obama's budget in Congress, Republicans have resorted to a three-pronged attack: the president is proposing unprecedented spending, irresponsible taxation, and using dishonest projections about how to pay for it all.

On the latter front, the GOP got a bit of an assist Sunday morning from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen.

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, the head of U.S. military forces said he didn't know where the Obama administration was getting its long-term projections for the money it will save by drawing down the war in Iraq. Asked by host Chris Wallace whether it was a budgetary "gimmick" that the government would save $183 billion in 2019 simply by drawing down the war in the next few years, Mullen said he wasn't sure. But he did say, on two occasions, that he never had seen that number before, the implicit message -- at least the one pushed by Wallace -- being that Obama had chosen rosy figures to meet its deficit reduction strategy.

Barack Obama