I didn’t hear President Obama’s speech yesterday in Cleveland, but based on the chatter from the Very Serious People and the harrumphing from the right, it sounds like he got their attention.

The speech was intended to offer a sharp contrast versus Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who delivered a stinging rebuke of the president’s economic stewardship in a speech moments earlier in Cincinnati. The Obama campaign said it was the first in a series of actions by Obama meant to frame the general election.

“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.

One speech doesn’t make a campaign, especially on a Thursday in June, but it sounds like the president’s campaign is finding a theme: do you want me or George W. Bush the Sequel?