The Administration

Last night’s State of the Union was largely uninspired. But what I disliked most was that it was disingenuous. The president has a wonderful way of portraying himself as a free marketer while championing more top-down, big-government spending projects — or, “investments,” as we’re calling them now — in transportation, infrastructure and education.

The president repeatedly tried to pull the wool over the American people’s eyes. Although, outside of the Washington beltway, I suspect people saw right through his dishonesty.

I had to laugh when I saw my brother and fellow pundit Rick Manning write that President Obama talks like Ronald Reagan but acts like Karl Marx. Setting aside that this level of analysis does not elevate our political discourse, brother Manning has it backwards.



Regarding Reagan, Obama's arms control policies are very much like Reagan's, who believed in arms control negotiations. The opponents of START resemble those on the right who attacked Reagan, which is why so many former Reagan officials supported Obama on START. Reagan believed in a big-tent Republican Party and a civil political discourse. Reagan would not like Manning's attack.



On healthcare the Obama plan bears a striking similarity to the healthcare proposals of Richard Nixon, and the healthcare law of former Gov. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.



Meanwhile, the Obama people are capitalists of the first order. Looks to me like the revolving door of former Obama staff leads directly to many highly paid jobs with very capitalist companies.



Some Republicans need to figure out why Tea Party negative ratings are rising in the polls, and why the president's positive ratings are rising as well.



In the meantime I look forward to Rick Manning attacking those two famous Marxists, Richard Nixon and Mitt Romney, for NixonCare and RomneyCare.

The State of the Union speech last night was one of the most positive, encouraging addresses in a long time. It hit the right tone for the American people, who want progress, who want a vision and who want to see an end to Washington business-as-usual gridlock.

It was also a skillful setup to the Republicans. It didn’t give them much to shoot at and complain about, nor did it provide the Fox News folks with much red meat. The Michele Bachmann response to the Ryan response and the Obama speech was an embarrassment and created confusion among the Republican base. Her off-camera-focused diatribe might have actually angered Republicans more than Democrats — the ego-driven effort to rally the new Tea Party members and true believers, in fact, drained attention from Congressman Ryan.

Speaking of the huddled masses, did anyone see the president’s speech last night? Was anything so childish and cloying as the prom-date theme? All boys and girls together holding hands. It all but cried out for Tiny Tim, rest in peace, in buckteeth and ukulele, singing, “Tiptoe through the tulips.” Cannot these people just say no to a bad idea? Has it occurred to anyone that the reason Congress has in recent times the lowest respect in the history of the English-speaking people — around 11 percent approval last fall — is because they are unable to oppose with character, dignity and integrity and overwhelmingly agree to just anything? Nations are not conquered by armies. They are conquered by mediocrity; the yielding of Prometheus’s second gift to the human race: the ability to stand up on your own two feet.

State of the Union speeches are sort of like party platforms: Once they’re delivered, nobody much remembers what’s in them.

What we do remember is the controversy — Bill Clinton giving his 1998 speech in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and all eyes on Hillary; more recently, last year, President Obama harshly criticizing a Supreme Court ruling and Justice Samuel Alito mouthing the words, “that’s not true.” Alito later said he felt like “a potted plant” and didn’t see the point of attending, and this year he stayed away, as did Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

As we approach tonight’s State of the Union address by President Obama, it reminds me of the Sherlock Holmes mystery when the British detective asked his assistant Dr. Watson about the dogs that didn’t bark. Key to understanding the president’s remarks will be the issues that he leaves out.

Read more...

After much anticipation that the new centrist — President Obama — would unveil substantial spending cuts or targets in his State of the Union address tonight, we learn he will ignore the recommendations of his own debt commission that labored for months to come up with a plan to put our fiscal house in order. Nonpartisan budget analysts who believe the president must lead on deficit reduction are growing doubtful that a grand bargain is possible.

After liberals spent weeks working to pressure the White House on Social Security cuts, Obama has reportedly assured Democratic lawmakers he would not support his commission’s recommendations to raise the retirement age or make any other cuts to the program, according to The Washington Post. Backing off of raising the retirement age? And just where is this middle ground going to come from if President Obama is ruling out something like that?

This first Obama State of the Union message in front of a divided Congress will be extraordinary theater as the president seeks to sound like the uniter people voted for in 2008, rather than the partisan leftist whose policies have driven our nation to the brink of insolvency.

Obama has seen a minor resurgence in the polls by virtue of his carefully burked Tucson speech calling for civility. Of course, this call was after four days of vitriolic attacks from his colleagues on the left, blaming conservatives from Sarah Palin to Rush Limbaugh for the actions of a Marxist anarchist who did not vote in the 2010 elections. 

It should come as no surprise that prominent Eisenhower family members support President Obama. Like Ike, Obama dislikes ideas like manned space travel, seeing them as carnival stunts that disturb the healthy body politic; believes people have the right to be happy with their families in their homes without external worries; and he accepts the Roman peace. On a personal level, Obama is possibly the most mature president since Ike, possibly because they share those same practical, earthy, flatland, Kansas values of Obama’s maternal grandparents. And in his way he seems to accept that he comes at the end of a period of history; Eisenhower’s a time of total war that destroyed Europe and much of the East; Obama’s a time when our country has soared on silver wings, which he must have felt last week honoring Merle Haggard, who took his stand as an Okie from Muskogee in 1969 but likes to pal today with Hillary. That he has shifted from the ideological left to the center almost overnight proves that like Ike, he was never a committed ideologist. But it is something Eisenhower would never have done. And it is, unfortunately, something most every president since has done.

The media is obsessed with the senior-prom nature of this year’s State of the Union address. My friends in press shops on Capitol Hill say that without a doubt, the most frequently asked question from the media this week is: “Who is your boss’s date for the speech?”

With two unpaid-for wars going on, a federal budget deficit and debt threatening to bankrupt our nation, a seemingly never-ending Bush recession putting millions of Americans out of work, a renewal of secret meetings between Congress and major corporations given unfettered access to set policies that enhance their bottom line while endangering public health, all the media can focus on is who will be the SOTU prom king and queen.