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Obama SOTU Address: "I Will Not Change"
Submitted by Krogenar on Fri, 01/29/2010 - 14:44
President Obama gave his first State of the Union address this past Wednesday, the transcript of which can be found online. It was interesting on a number of levels. The most anticipated question was whether Obama would use this opportunity to 'pivot' to the center politically. This was an important speech for the president considering the massive backlash his presidency is experiencing lately. Americans overwhelmingly oppose ObamaCare and feel Obama is not doing enough to create jobs.
Amazingly, Obama declared in his speech last night that he won't be pivoting, he won't be changing. It's America that's got to change. Follow the jump for more highlights.
In numerous points in his address, Obama cast himself as a populist avenger, fighting for 'the little guy' -- for Main Street.
So I know the anxieties that are out there right now. They're not new. These struggles are the reason I ran for president. These struggles are what I've witnessed for years in places like Elkhart, Indiana, Galesburg, Illinois.
I hear about them in the letters that I read each night. The toughest to read are those written by children, asking why they have to move from their home, asking when their mom or dad will be able to go back to work.
For these Americans and so many others, change has not come fast enough. Some are frustrated; some are angry. They don't understand why it seems like bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded, but hard work on Main Street isn't, or why Washington has been unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.
Does Obama really think populist class warfare anger is going to help him?
Overall, his tone was upbeat and hopeful, as he should be when delivering such an address. He was charming, going so far as to actually smile during his speech. His delivery was relaxed, adroit. Where this speech failed was in its content. There was really precious little that was new here, with the exception of a new plan to help people pay back college loans.
Obama proposed a three-year 'across the board' spending freeze, starting next year and exempting defense spending and a myriad group of other areas. In the end it amounts to really nothing more than a gimmick. Obama has already increased the funding by massive amounts, so all he's really committed to doing is keeping them at the increased level.
When Obama finally got around to talking about his healthcare bill, which has been twisting in the wind for eleven months he had nothing new to add. He repeated the now completely debunked mantras he started using back in January. He declared that his plan would save money (who still believes that?). He declared that people are being 'denied care' -- another lie. Finally, he declared that he wouldn't quit on healthcare 'reform' and asked the rest of the nation to stick with him. He declared that people with private health care wouldn't be forced to switch to the public plan.
Our approach would preserve the right of Americans who have insurance to keep their doctor and their plan. It would reduce costs and premiums for millions of families and businesses.
But that's a lie as well. No, the ObamaCare bill would not call for people to switch to another plan -- it would only make those existing private plans much, much more expensive via taxation, making them eventually dry up. Once those private insurers died off, there would only be the public option. Obama's only telling us the literal truth of the bill. Finally, rather than simply omitting the truth, Obama lies right to everyone's faces.
And according to the Congressional Budget Office, the independent organization that both parties have cited as the official scorekeeper for Congress, our approach would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades.
Why is this a lie? Obama knows that most Americans don't know how the CBO really works. Congress sends the specifications of a bill to the CBO with certain assumptions, and then the CBO makes calculations based on those assumptions. So for example, I send a bill to the CBO with that states that the government will fund a program to make printing presses that turn paper into solid gold. I then ask the CBO to determine whether this program would be profitable.
Of course it would be. The Democrats in Congress gamed the CBO's methodology by collecting taxes for the health 'reform' bill for the first year or two before the bill takes effect -- which shifts its costs into the future. Most serious commentators of this debate know this claim that ObamaCare will save us money is an outright lie. But that didn't stop the President from repeating it.
What was most jarring to me was Obama's oxymoronic claim that the 'tone' of Washington had to change, that it was cruel, mean-spirited, dedicated to (in his word) 'embarassing your opponents'. If Washington is so dysfunctional, why should Americans see Washington as its savior? And even as Obama asked for bipartisanship, he blamed President Bush for the economic straits we're in.
As I've stated before in other places, an American president shouldn't make so many excuses. What we saw last night was not a pivot, but a recasting of Obama as a class warrior. He's not changing his tack, his not adjusting his sails. Obama has dug himself deeper into an ideological bunker, and it's going to require a crushing series of defeats in November to dig him out, if ever.
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