“… an unconvincing veneer of Clintonism over the same, hulking agenda of government aggrandizement”

Analysis of the SOU by Richard Lowry at the Corner:

I’m less harsh than my colleagues on Obama’s performance from the podium. I’m guessing most people found his delivery, as Ed Morrissey tweeted last night, energetic and engaged rather than condescending and unpresidential. If anyone was still paying attention when he glared at Republicans at the end, I can’t imagine them being particularly offended by it. The over-arching problem was that the speech made no sense…. the political effect of Obama’s smaller proposals—all poll-tested to the max, I’m assuming—will be washed away by the continuing opposition to his hugely unpopular health-care bill. Even his poll-tested initiatives contradicted each other: All the government activism he plugged at the beginning of the speech had to make people wonder how he was going to accomplish his spending freeze, itself an exercise in political positioning. It’s a sign of how lost he is that he invoked the “I didn’t explain clearly enough” defense on health care—this from the guy whose every utterance has been hyped as brilliant, moving, and for the ages. By the end, the self-pity (it reminded me a little of that debate where Bush kept on saying the Iraq war is hard) and the dishonesty (it’s as if he didn’t bless all the back-room deals that have disgusted people) interacted in a toxic way. Here is a man check-mated by his own P.R., which created the otherwordly expectation that all the inherent difficulties of governing could be resolved in himself, and his blatant misreading of the electorate and his mandate. One thing I found interesting at the end was the long stretch without any applause. That was refreshing and makes me wonder if some day a president will have the gumption to give a serious, thematic 15-speech with no applause lines. That could be a powerful break with the hour-long drudgery. Anyway, the motto (rather disastrously) of Obama’s first year was that you don’t let a crisis go to waste. For Obama, Massachusetts is apparently a crisis that will go to waste, as he tries to throw an unconvincing veneer of Clintonism over the same, hulking agenda of government aggrandizement.

— end of initial entry —

LA writes:

I’ve watched about half the speech on youtube and I agree with Lowry about Obama’s demeanor. The numerous comments at the Corner about how mean and unpleasant Obama was do not seem correct to me. He seems rather affable and upbeat.

This is apart from the question that most everything he was saying was a lie.

But the point is, as far as his demeanor is concerned, he does not come across as a defeated, embittered president, hunkered down in denial and lashing out at enemies, which is the way many conservatives portrayed him after the speech.

LA writes;

His lying goes over the top toward the end of the speech when, after denouncing partisanshhip, he says (paraphrase), “Let’s put aside schoolyard taunts about who is tougher. We all love our country, we all care about its defense.”

This unspeakable person had said last month, “We’re at war with al Qaeda,” then treated an Al Qaeda warrior seeking to mass murder Americans as an ordinary criminal defendant; and when this spectacular contradiction is pointed out by Republicans, Obama, after first denouncing partisanship, has the audacity to say that the Republicans are engaging in school yard taunts about who is tougher. He is contemptible.

This is the SOU by the USO—the State of the Union by the Unspeakable One.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 28, 2010 11:43 AM | Send