The Pledge to America: The Basics

Here is the preamble of the Pledge on YouTube. It's a little dry for a YouTube video, but the writing is pretty good, and the beginning is quite uplifiting:

The Democrats have already released a response, which uses Newt Gingrich and George Bush as its bogeymen.

The White House's Dan Pfeiffer:

“Instead of charting a new course, Congressional Republicans doubled down on the same ideas that hurt America’s middle class. … This is the same agenda that caused the deepest recession since the Great Depression … Instead of a pledge to the American people, Congressional Republicans made a pledge to the big special interests to restore the same economic ideas that benefited them at the expense of middle-class families.”

What the administration and Democrats don't consider, though, is that the health-care process revealed that Washington is broken in an entirely different way than the uperficially populist way Obama talked about it being broken, and that Obama was willing to exacerbate the problems to pass bills he liked. The Pledge attempts to grapple with Americans' new awareness of how their government works. Even where it falls short (and I think Congressional, entitlement reforms and moves toward transparency could have been much bolder), it has a leg up on Democrats who have not yet realized that Obama's mere "special interests" bashing doesn't work anymore because the American people consider the federal government a special interest in and of itself.

Update: Club for Growth says, "milquetoast."