Joshua Holland: Has Obama Finally Shaken Up Washington?

On Monday, Barack Obama proffered a deficit reduction package that would complement his call last week for a new focus on jobs. The proposals, especially the president's endorsement of the "Buffet Principle", which holds that the richest Americans should pay the same share of their incomes as their secretaries do, appears to have fired up the Democratic base. "This is not class warfare, it's math" became the line of the day, and even Firedoglake , a site known for attacking Obama from the left, acknowledged that while he "spent the first 2.5 years of his presidency courting" pundits and blue dog Democrats, Obama now appears to "on the right track." Yet the president didn't offer a lot of new proposals in the jobs package he presented last week, nor in the deficit reduction plan he offered on Monday. Rather, he struck a new tone, which is itself significant. As the New York Times put it, "Obama confirmed that he had entered a new, more combative phase of his presidency." Substance aside, the proposals have already had a salutary effect, refocusing the attention of a media obsessed with process onto a devastating jobs crisis to which they'd given short shrift over past few years.