When Dr. K is right, he’s spot-on. This is an excellent wrap up of the vapid State of the Union speech. The good news for the GOP is that while Obama may have heard the voters from November, he is too ideologically driven to listen to them.
by Charles Krauthammer
The November election sent a clear message to Washington: less government, less debt, less spending. President Obama certainly heard it, but judging from his State of the Union address, he doesn’t believe a word of it.
The people say they want cuts? Sure they do – in the abstract. But any party that actually dares carry them out will be punished severely. On that, Obama stakes his re-election.
No other conclusion can be drawn from a speech that didn’t even address the debt issue until 35 minutes in. And then what did he offer? A freeze on domestic discretionary spending that he himself admitted would affect a mere one-eighth of the budget.
Obama seemed impressed, however, that it would produce $400 billion in savings over 10 years. That’s an average of $40 billion a year. The deficit for last year alone was more than 30 times as much. And total federal spending was more than 85 times that amount. A $40 billion annual savings for a government that just racked up $3 trillion in new debt over the last two years is deeply unserious. It’s spillage, a rounding error.
As for entitlements, which are where the real money is, Obama said practically nothing. He is happy to discuss, but if Republicans dare take anything from granny, he shall be Horatius at the bridge.
[…]
Perhaps this is all to be expected from Democrats – the party of government – and from a President who from his very first address to Congress has boldly displayed his zeal to fundamentally transform the American social contract and place it on a “New Foundation” (an Obama slogan that never took). He’s been chastened enough by the election of 2010 to make gestures toward the center. But the State of the Union address revealed a man ideologically unbowed and undeterred. He served up an insignificant spending cut, yet another (if more modest) stimulus and a promise to fight any Republican attempt to significantly shrink the size of government.
Indeed, he went beyond this. He tried to cast this more-of-the-same into a call to national greatness, citing two Michigan brothers who produce solar shingles as a stirring example of rising to the Sputnik moment.
“We do big things,” Obama declared at the end of an address that was, on the contrary, the finest example of small-ball Clintonian minimalism since the days of school uniforms and midnight basketball.
From the moon landing to solar shingles. Is there a better example of American decline?
Read the rest here: The old Obama in new clothing
Tags: Charles Krauthammer
