President Obama's State of the Union speech is not one week old. Yet it is pretty much dead as a motive force for American renewal. Has anyone seen a SOTU fall so far so fast? Only last Tuesday its Kennedyesque call to "win the future" sounded the right note for the year, even for the decade. Obama spoke with confidence, optimism and grace, avoiding that peevish self pity he is prone to. The SOTU capped a remarkable two-month personal comeback for Obama "“ a 10-point lift in approval ratings from the low 40s nadir in November.
Then, pfffft.
What happened? Where did Obama’s SOTU go? The music is gone and no echoes can be heard. Gone in one week. Is the problem us and our ADD culture? Did the terrible shooting and miraculous recovery of Gabby Giffords hand Obama one of those unrepeatable emotional moments? Has Egypt reminded Americans, again, of the flipside of Obama's youth and brainy idealism "“ inexperience and paralysis?
Maybe it was those. Maybe, too, it was the SOTU speech itself. Some stories, songs and wines get better on the second experience, their richness revealed as layers. Some things are the opposite; analysis and second helpings show mostly what is not there. Obama's 2011 SOTU is apparently one of those.
There was nothing in the SOTU that resonated for even a week! The SOTU collapsed inward like a black hole under the gravity of its own platitudes and contradictions.
As WSJ's Dan Henninger put it:
"No president before Barack Obama has been so right and so wrong. When in his State of the Union speech Mr. Obama said, ‘This is our generation’s Sputnik moment,’ citing the emergence of global competition from the likes of China and India, he was right. Minutes later he proposed to cover the country with high-speed rail and companies making solar shingles."
Newsweek's Robert Samuelson said it much the same:
"It was a teachable moment — and Barack Obama didn’t teach. What we got were empty platitudes. We won’t be "?buried under a mountain of debt,' Obama declared. Heck, we’re already buried. We will "?win the future. Not by deluding ourselves, we won’t."
The Telegraph's Nile Gardiner addressed the false promise of regulatory reform.
"In itself, this is a good idea, although the president makes it explicit that the cost-benefit analysis must take account of — as benefits — intangible factors such as ‘equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.’ Plenty of leeway there for career regulators and liberal political appointees to justify almost any oppressive regulation they may stumble over.”
The San Francisco Chronicle's Debra Saunders dissects the oxymoron called government innovation.
“In light of the country’s high unemployment rate, you would think it would make more sense for the administration to focus on creating jobs in industries that hire lots of workers. But many of those sectors — manufacturing, energy production — don’t reflect liberal politics. So Obama is big on ‘jobs of the future.’”
But no one nails Obama’s retro view of the future better than Denver Post’s David Harsanyi:
"Early on in his State of the Union, for instance, President Barack Obama reminisced of an age when ‘good jobs’ meant ’showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown.’ A time when you ‘didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors,’ and if you ‘worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck and good benefits and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company.’
"Way to dream big! Really, was this country ever about being proud that your children ended up in the same plant you slaved in for 30 years? Even with a promise of a union pension and — if you’re lucky — an ‘occasional’ promotion, it sounds like a soul-crushing grind you’d want your offspring to escape, tout de suite."
Obama’s SOTU has vanished without a trace. Good riddance.
's Categories: Op/Ed, Uncategorized, Washington, byline=Rich Karlgaard
Hi Rich,
I see that you are happy to see the SOTU address vanish from the press coverage. Given its emphasis on innovation, I was wondering what you thought should have been in the address?
Steve
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I am the publisher of Forbes, have written a column for the magazine since 1998, and have blogged for Forbes.com since 2005. In 2004 I wrote a book, Life 2.0, which was a Wall Street Journal business best-seller. I travel 200,000 miles a year on the speech circuit and am regular guest on Fox News Channel's Forbes on Fox and a semi-regular one on CNBC's Kudlow & Co. Steve Forbes recruited me in 1992 to start Forbes ASAP, a technology magazine. Before that, I had co-founded two companies (Garage Technology Ventures, in 1997; and Upside Magazine in 1988) and one civic organization (the 6,500-member Churchill Club in 1985). I am currently an outside director for two tech companies: Intelius, a search provider; and Flow Mobile, a broadband wireless company.
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