Fresh off his Tucson triumph, President Obama laid an egg Tuesday night in his State of the Union speech. Fittingly, it came on the same day that Hollywood announced the Oscar nominations. Campaign 2012 is off to a bad start.
If Washington, as the saying goes, is Tinseltown for ugly people, then the State of the Union Address is the Academy Awards. Today, they’re both showbiz, in which the main event is a speech.
And not just a speech but a script for the coming political battles. Obama’s Chicago brain trust of David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel has already returned to the Windy City, campaign headquarters for 2012, trying to figure out a way to mask his reckless radicalism and fool the public just one more time — and then have a clear four years to fully implement their “fundamental transformation” of America.
Alas, the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. Even as it makes fewer films every year, Hollywood has upped the number of nominees in the Best Picture category from five to 10. And while the State of the Union may once have actually been about the country, today it’s a campaign speech — a wish list of programs that will never be implemented, of pies that will stay resolutely in the sky.
The Middle East is on fire, the economy is in shambles, the government borrows 40 percent of the money it’s currently spending, trillion-dollar deficits threaten the foundations of our society and untouchable “entitlements” like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will eventually devour the federal budget (in fiscal 2009, they accounted for 39 percent of total federal spending, far more than defense) — and what does the president talk about?
Spending even more nonexistent money on things like education and green technology.
It’s long past time for someone to stand up and say that these things are not the proper sphere of government. Obama’s belated celebration of American exceptionalism — part of his well-choreographed but patently phony “pivot” to the center — ignores the fact that American exceptionalism has nothing whatsoever to do with government.
Thomas Edison didn’t need a government program to invent the phonograph, the movie camera or the light bulb. All he needed was his own genius.
As for education, experience has shown that there is little to no correlation among the amount of public spending, the quality of the education and the achievement of the pupils. And yet still the president persists in peddling this myth.
Does anybody seriously believe that, within 25 years, 80 percent of the population will have access to high-speed rail? Yet that was one thing Obama promised Tuesday night in a tedious, droning address that was widely and bipartisanly panned: Veteran progressive journalist Robert Scheer called it “platitudinous hogwash,” and even the usual media cheerleaders couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it.
Perhaps it came too soon on the heels of the memorial service/pep rally in Arizona, which featured whooping college students, a logo and souvenir T-shirts to punctuate the somber atmosphere.
The president has recently experienced a bump in the polls. Some attribute that to his “successes” in the lame duck, others to the Tucson speech. But off last night’s evidence, it’s more likely because, like a good actor, he knew enough to get off the stage over the holiday break. When speechifying is your only talent, you shouldn’t go to the well too often — and yet you must go the well too often.
That’s the conundrum facing Axelrod & Co. — who must realize that what worked in 2008 today seems tired, shopworn and predictable. Because, as Tuesday night reminded us, a little of Obama goes a long way.