Obama's economy speech: 'He spoke eloquently, but ...'

“Clarity in Need of Courage” is the title of an editorial in today’s Washington Post about yesterday’s speech on the economy by President Obama. A very good speech, according to the WP, on many fronts, but Obama “overstates” his case in one crucial area and “loses all candor and courage” in another. The overstating comes

in linking his policy agenda to the economic recovery. The agenda focuses on education, renewable energy and health care. These are all worthy pursuits, areas where we support many of his proposals.

But these pursuits

have little to do with the economic crisis, and they are not the key to economic recovery. The recovery will result from successfully transitioning away from an economy overly dependent on debt and the American consumer, unclogging the banking system, stabilizing housing -- and dealing with the fiscal imbalances facing the country that were bad before, are worse now and, if left unattended, could well cause the next crisis.
[…]
We understand that spending more on education, energy and health care is an easy sell to a Democratic Congress, while deficit reduction and entitlement reform are hard. We thought the president had signed up for both.

They thought … Do they still think that now?