State of the Union speeches are usually lousy, but for the hour of Barack Obama’s fifth, it seemed like he had lowered the annual presidential laundry list of half-baked policy proposals tradition to its nadir.
This was the most plodding, enervated and pointless national address of his presidency, and easily the worst and least consequential since the elder George Bush’s in 1992.
That is, until its heartrending and ennobling concluding passage, when the President took beautiful note of the extraordinary sacrifices and challenges faced by Sgt. First Class Cory Remsburg, an American soldier nearly killed in Afghanistan on his tenth — his tenth — deployment into a war zone.
In the moment when the assembled Congress and Cabinet and guests stood and applauded Remsburg, and the wounded soldier began to shake with emotion, one had a thrilling momentary rush of that feeling in the months after 9/11 when the nation seemed to possess a unity of national spirit for the first time since World War II.
And then, as quickly as it came, the feeling was gone. The president wrapped up with a weak effort to liken Remsburg’s refusal to give up with America’s refusal to give up, or something like that. “Believe it,” he said, and that was it.
Believe what, exactly?
If you needed further evidence that the Obama administration is running on fumes, last night was it.
People generally dismiss the sorts of unambitious proposals the president threw around for most of the speech as “playing smallball.” This was more like nanoball.
Open more job training centers! Have some more job hubs! Make sure it only takes a half an hour to vote! The president even announced the creation of a cute little new retirement-savings program so badly named that he muffed it three times in three sentences (it’s called “MyRA” — see, it’s like IRA only it’s “My RA”!).
Then there were the exhortations. Women don’t make enough money compared to men, he said — citing a much-publicized but wildly controversial stat — so maybe everybody should get on that.
Oh, and while they’re at it, employers should give people raises, like a guy who runs a pizza parlor who was in the audience next to a kid whose compensation he lifted to $10 an hour. They both looked bewildered to be there.
The president praised a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 — which only demonstrates the nakedly political and unserious nature of the plan. That’s a number chosen because it’s catchy and easy to make a slogan out of. It was not chosen because it conforms to any actual theory about what would benefit workers without causing undue hardship on the businesses they work for — the central and undying problem with minimum wage laws.
You got the sense, listening to him, that even the president doesn’t think much of these things. And he shouldn’t.
Once it was very different for him. He spent the first 16 months of his presidency pushing through a trillion-dollar stimulus, partly nationalizing the auto industry and then securing ObamaCare.
In those months, he was playing the very opposite of smallball. But his wild overreach helped created the backlash among the electorate that has frozen his agenda in place ever since.
“This could be a breakthrough year for America,” he said at the outset, with no conviction whatever.
It took the sight of Sgt. First Class Cory Remsburg to save the night, as Remsberg and hundreds of thousands of Americans have worked so tirelessly and with such conviction to save us all.