Barack Obama doesn’t have his mojo back. Last night’s State of the Union was so pedestrian that even its most provocative sections — proposing new taxes and new witch hunts — had little rhetorical power or oomph.
The candidate who suggested his victory in the Texas primary would be remembered as the moment at which the waters of the ocean would literally begin to recede has entirely lost his capacity to inspire — or to frighten his rivals — by his oratorical gifts alone.
Without that force, and without much of a record to run on, he instead turned the classic State of the Union laundry list into his own personal Amazon.com gift registry. If Congress wants to be nice to him and to the American people, he said, it will send him various bills with lots of goodies in them, and when they arrive, all he’ll have to do is sign for them.
Please. The president knows the horrifying reality of the mounting deficit and the unprecedented debt, and the nightmarish charts showing the public sector eating up the entirety of the national GDP over the next two decades. Even if he succeeds in ending the Bush tax cuts at the end of this year, the windfall to the Treasury will be eaten up instantly by existing demands.
And yet, he proposed no fewer than six new federal projects in the first half-hour of the speech. You get the sense that even the liberal congressmen and senators standing and applauding have no real expectation that any of those proposals will ever, or could ever, become law.
The president whose signature pieces of legislation will cost the Treasury more than $2 trillion — and who did not succeed in creating an explosion of economic growth — is in a terrible position to propose new spending plans. He already tried it last September in his “pass this bill now” speech, and that effort was stillborn.
Obama learned from Ronald Reagan that it helps to strike an optimistic tone. But genuine optimism deriving from American exceptionalism, it turns out, does not come naturally to him.
His general solution for the national economic trough is more government intervention, and even by his own reckoning, government intervention is necessary only because the private sector is just too broken. “I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed,” he said, “that government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.”
Logically, then, the extraordinary degree of intervention into the economy he proposes can only mean America is in desperately bad shape and can’t get itself back on its feet on its own.
Even when he sought to praise the condition of the country, he could do so only with hesitation. “The state of the union is getting stronger,” he said, praising his own record of bailing out auto companies as part of the reason.
The best he could do, in the worst line of the evening, was this: “America is back . . . Anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned, doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” Oh. OK.
He concluded with a deserved salute to the extraordinary work of SEAL Team Six in killing Osama Bin Laden. His description of how they did it was gripping — until he decided to claim that it had something to teach us about America:
“No one built this country on their own. This nation is great because we built it together. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.”
It is a tragedy for this nation that its president believes this. America is great not because it’s a team. America is great because it is a nation whose founding documents elevated the rights of the individual.
Aside from his poor record, this misunderstanding of the US is Obama’s gravest weakness as a general-election candidate, and the Republicans running for president should take heed and go at it.