Obama made the better argument Monday night, but that doesn't mean he's going to come out on top once the battle over the deficit winds down
John Boehner is no Bobby Jindal. The Louisiana governor established the gold standard for a laughably inept response to a presidential address in 2009, and I intend no disservice to Boehner's earnest bid for the title Monday night when I say he came up short. True, his cadences were sing-songy, and his direct, manly eye contact wasn't with us viewers, but rather with a teleprompter positioned a tad too far from the camera lens, and his rote rehearsal of disingenuous, oft-told, and almost content-free Republican talking points carried very little conviction. But he wasn't sufficiently Eddie Haskell-like for this to have posed a serious threat to Jindal's primacy, let alone for ending any hopes of a national career.
Of course, his career may be in jeopardy anyway. He is a speaker who has patently lost control of his own conference, and that doesn't augur well for his long-term prospects even if his party retains control of the House. And he has his own Uriah Heep -- well, that might not be fair to Uriah Heep; Eric Cantor lacks Heep's finesse -- maneuvering, unofficially if not exactly covertly, to replace him. Which may well have been one aspect, although only one, of the speaker's difficulty delivering his speech Monday night. It's public knowledge that he had been prepared to accept a deal with the president, but was rebuffed by the most militant faction in his caucus. As a consequence, his air of sorrowful indignation was somewhat less than convincing; he couldn't have sounded nearly so indignant when he saw fit to say yes. So he ended up sounding like a hostage reading a list of his captors' demands for a video about to be released to Al Jazeera.