Obama SOTU Address: "I Will Not Change"
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.
- Krogenar's blog
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McDonnell's response
-relantel
Well done, K. Thank you for being the guinea pig.
Well done, K. Thank you for being the guinea pig with the speech - I am glad we didn't watch it. I think we watched an October episode of Medium instead. (I bet NBC wishes it had that show back now, in light of the Leno flop)
The two biggest items in the news yesterday here in the DC area were the response given by Bob McDonnell (they're talking him up for national politics) and Justice Alito's "not true" mutter when Obama attacked the Court's ruling in Citizens United. (The descision that said corporations have a right to speech, after all, a corporation is a collection of individuals, so in essence, the old law had been infringing on free speech and free association... the decision said nothing about the existing law that bans foreign persons and corporations from contributing...)
The thing that kills me is they talked it up like it was Obama's first SOTU, yet they kept referring to "last year" talking about Joe Wilson, with the context implying it was at last year's SOTU!
-relantel
"Not True"
The two biggest items in the news yesterday here in the DC area were the response given by Bob McDonnell (they're talking him up for national politics) and Justice Alito's "not true" mutter when Obama attacked the Court's ruling in Citizens United. (The descision that said corporations have a right to speech, after all, a corporation is a collection of individuals, so in essence, the old law had been infringing on free speech and free association... the decision said nothing about the existing law that bans foreign persons and corporations from contributing...)
In regards to Obama's remarks about Citizens United -- it is so disingenuous of Obama to decry the lack of civility in Washington, and then he immediately applies that exact tactic on the Supreme Court. I've been searching through the available online transcripts, but none of them seem to feature the reference to Citizen's United. It's possible that Obama added this into the speech after releasing the official speech.
Ironically, that's the part of the speech that sounded the most Nixonian to me. From what I've found, Obama said:
If that's not lobbing a straw man at the Supreme Court, I don't know what is! He's basically saying that the Supreme Court wants our elections to be dominated by money from enemy governments. Two huge shockers here! One, Obama deigns to name another nation an 'enemy' -- that's a precedent. Second, wasn't it Obama would received most of his funding online, with almost no identity checking whatsoever? Didn't he receive credit card donations from 'Mickey Mouse' and 'I.P. Freely', if I recall?
There's always been something about Obama's delivery of 'facts' that is so shabby that it makes people like Alito and Joe Wilson fidget. The president knits impressive generalities and half-truths together, and its hard to hear.
I am glad, however, that Obama is essentially staying on the same disastrous course. He'll cripple his own presidency in short order.
-Krogenar
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