Backfire.

And yes, that matters, not just for humanitarian and spiritual reasons, but also for social accord and cooperation.  A truly healthy society would have the working class within a dignified living standard, and even the poor able to access essentials such as food, shelter, and health care.  Fortunately, while we aren’t perfect, the standard of [...]

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And doomed, says Politico.

Actually, this could be the consensus.  David Corn wrote Tuesday night that Barack Obama’s speech “present[ed] a powerful progressive agenda.”  It’s been a long time since Ronald Reagan made the idea of big government solutions toxic and Bill Clinton delivered its eulogy, but Obama managed to exhume it for an evening.  But does that mean [...]

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Savior?

Former Vice President Dick Cheney pronounced himself a “big fan” of Sen. Marco Rubio in a radio interview Wednesday, calling the Florida senator a “first-rate asset.” “Marco’s great,” Cheney said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. “I’m a big fan of his.”… “He’s a first-rate asset,” the former vice president said. “We’ll be hearing a lot [...]

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Fatigue?

That’s what the numbers say, but I’ve been burned before by trusting preliminary ratings for political speeches so the headline gets a question mark. At first blush, Clinton’s DNC speech looked like it had underperformed. It hadn’t. The initial ratings for Romney’s first debate with Obama looked great. Then, after the later data came in, [...]

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"It appears President Obama's chief speechwriter has been replaced by a cliché-generator circa 1960," says ....

State of the Union speeches are known for their reliance on empty promises and well-worn clichés, but last night’s SOTU has one that’s even emptier and well-worn than most.  The RNC produced this video at practically the same time Barack Obama was telling the nation, “Let me repeat: Nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our [...]

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Cherry picking.

After Barack Obama’s inaugural speech only mentioned the economy once and jobs just three times in a 2100-word address, the White House pronounced themselves shocked, shocked that anyone would have assumed that neither was a priority for Obama in his second term.  The White House promised that the State of the Union would focus more [...]

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Bread, and water, and circus.

Via the Examiner, I’d call this a case study in effective damage control but that presupposes that an unscripted sip of water during a speech constitutes “damage,” and I can’t bring myself to believe that our frivolous political culture has yet reached that depth. There are three things going on in the media frenzy over [...]

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"What America needs is not Robin Hood, but Adam Smith."

As I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech live, I also missed the two responses to it from Barack Obama’s opposition.  The networks carried Marco Rubio’s speech live, but most viewers had to go to the Tea Party Express website to watch Rand Paul rebut Obma’s SOTU address.  While some may complain about [...]

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Thirst for leadership.

As I wrote earlier, I’m no fan of State of the Union speeches. I’m usually no fan of the opposition-party responses, either, for a variety of reasons. First, they suffer in comparison to the pomp offered the President and can’t avoid seeming anti-climactic. The only person who ever really got that was Virginia Governor Bob [...]

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Hobby horses on parade.

Last night, I had to attend a board meeting, a commitment that one would normally try to avoid.  Instead, I celebrated the fact, because it allowed me to miss the live presentation of the State of the Union speech.  Rather than watch it live or even on YouTube, I read the speech later from the [...]

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Tedium.

9 p.m. ET all across the dial. I shouldn’t say “instantly forgettable”: His aides say he’ll “throw down the gauntlet” to the GOP, and there’s always a chance that he’ll misrepresent a Supreme Court ruling with the justices sitting right there in front of him, so the memory of this one could linger for up [...]

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Denial.

A fitting amuse bouche for tonight’s meal, which is officially so desperate for a sense of mystery and import, the president briefly appeared today to announce that there would be no announcements about the content thereof. You big tease. Expect to hear a lot more of this in this vein tonight. Denial: It ain’t just [...]

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Brazening it out?

Most people expected Barack Obama to make a big pitch for nuclear drawdowns as well as drawdowns in troop strength in Afghanistan in tonight’s State of the Union speech, part of his ongoing effort to reduce and eliminate nuclear stockpiles and oppose modernization of strategic arsenals.  Yesterday, the New York Times predicted that Obama would [...]

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Like clockwork.

Tonight, one of the grandest and emptiest of presidential traditions returns — the State of the Union address to the joint session of Congress.  The annual report is required by the Constitution, but not in person; until 1913, Presidents usually sent a written status report.  We can thank Woodrow Wilson for the modern tradition, which [...]

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Leverage.

CNN’s Jake Tapper reports that Barack Obama will announce a dramatic drawdown of troop strength in Afghanistan in tonight’s State of the Union speech, a signal that he’s accelerating the end game of the US combat mission. Troop strength will be cut in half over the next year, amounting to a withdrawal of 34,000 troops: [...]

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“Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”

This doesn’t mean it won’t be overlong, enervating, and instantly disposable like the last four were, just more peevish than usual. It’ll also be an occasion for O to “pivot to jobs” for the seventh or eighth time in his presidency, which I take it means 15-20 minutes about the middle class and the latest [...]

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Rivals.

Not unusual but still significant. Paul’s delivered his own SOTU rebuttal each year since joining the Senate. The Tea Party Express has sponsored a SOTU rebuttal each year during the same period, with Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain having done the honors in 2011 and 2012, respectively. The news here isn’t that they’re hooking up, [...]

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Natural.

Who else could it have been? Jindal and Paul Ryan have already done it, Rand Paul’s probably still too close to the rEVOLution for Republican leaders to be comfortable with him in a spot like this, and Chris Christie would just end up talking about how terrific Obama’s speech was. Half the reason party leaders [...]

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Martial.

“The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory — he killed Osama bin Laden! — and to convince the American people that they should [...]

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Say it! SAY IT!

Say, do you remember the President giving some sort of speech on Tuesday night? Me neither… I was going to watch it, but I’d DVR’d the last three weeks of Full Throttle Saloon and simply had to catch up. But I did manage to catch the text and the replay the next day. And like [...]

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Plus, a caption contest!

Sometimes, it doesn’t even really take a breaking-news hook to appreciate Michael Ramirez.  The two-time Pultizer Prize winning editorial cartoonist sums up Barack Obama’s class warfare strategy perfectly in one image from the day before Obama’s State of the Union speech (via Power Line): Nate Beeler followed up yesterday on the hypocrisy of Obama’s message [...]

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92 percent?

Granted, granted, their sample is a ludicrous 44% Democrat and 25% Republican. And yes, it’s true that this guy is recycling his talking points from one speech to the next, year after wearying year. But hey: Last year just 83 percent approved of his SOTU remarks. He’s up nearly 10 points this time go round. [...]

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Middle-class votes still matter.

Rick Santorum has distinguished himself among his GOP competitors as a “supply-sider for the working man,” as a candidate who has tailored his economic plan to the needs of manufacturers and blue-collar workers. He calls, for example, for the complete elimination of corporate taxes for manufacturers. He happens to believe “making things” creates wealth, he [...]

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"This is a president whose words say one thing, but his policies result in just the opposite."

Earlier today, I participated in the virtual Blogger Row for House Republicans for reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union speech, and spoke with Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS). Rep. Pompeo sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which led to an interesting discussion of the obstacles being tossed in front of natural-gas production [...]

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"Precious few details."

Jim Pethokoukis thinks it might be, but I’m not so sure.  As described by Barack Obama, the program is a significant expansion of a couple of programs that so far had been limited to Fannie/Freddie-backed mortgages.  CNBC explains that the new initiative will now promote refinancing for mortgages no matter if backed by one of [...]

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