It sounds good on paper and in theory, the two options should be much more distinct than they are in reality. Obama is not wrong that the GOP is all about obstruction and continuing the extremist economic policies that got us here in the first place. Unfortunately those policies have Democratic hands all over them (Bill Clinton, for starters) and we've seen too little progress on economic reform since 2008.
There continues to be a strong sentiment that too little has changed and too little effort has been made to change the overall dynamics. There's also a sense that there's been too little support for agents of change, which is highly frustrating.
That said, going back to a GOP Congress and GOP White House should be a horrifying prospect for the country. The Republicans will surely explode with the "blame Bush" theme but of course, it's not incorrect. At least Obama is finally coming around to embracing what many have been saying for a long time.
“What's holding us back is a stalemate in Washington between two fundamentally different views of which direction America should take. And this election is your chance to break that stalemate,” Obama said. “At stake is not simply a choice between two candidates or two political parties, but between two paths for our country.”
For Obama, the GOP path – which, he said, Romney would advance along with unpopular congressional Republicans, hand-in-hand – represented a retread of the policies during the Bush administration. A Romney administration, the president warned, would award expensive tax cuts mostly to the wealthy and let corporations run amok of regulations, all while gutting support for education and infrastructure.
The speech was firmly ensconced in a kind of “Blame Bush” strategy that Republicans frequently decry as a political red herring, and Romney tried to keep the focus on the past three years.
