President Obama`s State of the Union Address: Confusion and Indignation

Jan 28, 2010 President Obama`s State of the Union Address: Confusion and Indignation

The President’s first State of the Union Address was an appropriate reflection of his first year in office: rhetorically ambitious, pragmatically muddled, ideologically dangerous, and surprisingly naïve for a product of the Chicago political machine. But as with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Amory Blaine, for whom “It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being,” so too did Barack Obama focus more upon ascending to high office than on using it well. The President is now stuck upon his pinnacle. To borrow a metaphor from the Owens Valley where I spent my high school years, he’s a turtle on a post: you aren’t sure how he got there, and he’s not sure what he’ll do about it.

Before listing the many negatives of the President’s speech, allow me to visit the one positive, when the President said of energy, "That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development..." As someone who has authored five bills on modern nuclear power in the past four years as well as a major piece of offshore oil legislation (the latter actually passed the State Senate) while working on a comprehensive offshore oil and gas bill that I’ll soon introduce, I was delighted to hear these words from the President. His recent record on these matters, however, brings doubt that word will translate into deed.

As for the rest of the speech? The President’s confusion, leavened with indignation at the forces that confound him, was on full display as the evening ground on.

Why? Turn the clock back one year, to January 2009. That month saw the ascent to office of perhaps the most ideologically left-wing Federal legislature and executive in our nation’s history. President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi began the year intent upon a fundamental reordering of American life via politics. A dramatic expansion of government, from industry seizures to an extravagant “stimulus” to a takeover of healthcare, was the order of the day. The liberals were energized and empowered. Decades of pent-up plans were to be unleashed upon America.

From a political perspective, it’s impossible to gainsay their confident ambition, even in retrospect. The Republican Party was laid low in three years of self-inflicted disaster from 2005 through 2008, as the American people woke up to the baleful reality that it had ossified in power, and strayed far from its conservative roots. By the 2008 election, Republicans in Washington, D.C., had managed to tarnish the party’s once-sterling reputation for fiscal rectitude, national-security competence, and sound governance. The American people duly punished them at the polls that fall.

In that light, it’s no surprise that Democrats and liberals thought they had a mandate for their own agenda. It’s no further surprise that they thought Republicans and conservatives wouldn’t be a threat for a long while. But we are, and there’s two reasons for it. One reason is that conservatives have risen up across the country, and are dragging Republicans back to first principles — whether they like it or not.

The other reason is that the Obama-led liberals have spent the past year taking every error of the George W. Bush era — and doubling down on them.

The President’s State of the Union Address was a sad litany of those errors. Among them:

The President refuses to face up to the national debt. This showed through again and again. He described a series of small tax cuts, but no spending cuts whatsoever. He rightly noted the massive increases in debt and spending under his predecessor — “All this was before I walked in the door” — but omitted his own responsibility for running up both, in a single year, by orders of magnitude more than recent profligate Congresses and their enabler George W. Bush ever did. His much-touted 2011-2014 spending freeze, a topic of much anguish on the left, would in fact affect a risibly tiny percentage of federal expenditures. Here, as in so many things, Barack Obama is deeply unserious.

The President does not understand economics, part one. About 160 years ago, Frédéric Bastiat wrote of the broken-window parable, to explain how governmental appropriation and redistribution is not the same as economic growth and wealth creation. It’s among the most basic economic lessons, and it’s one Barack Obama — and most Democrats — would do well to learn. Time and again the President spoke of new jobs, transient and ephemeral though they are, created by the ruinous stimulus — the money for which came from your pocket and prodigious borrowing.

The President does not understand economics, part two. One of the first clues that the George W. Bush Administration was not conservative in economic affairs was the politically motivated imposition of the 2002 steel tariffs. The idea that trade and its electoral benefits can be manipulated to win votes ends is not new, but there is ample evidence that the net economic effect is nearly always bad. It’s in that light that the President’s announcement of a “National Export Initiative” to “double our exports over the next five years” has an ominous ring. A doubling of American exports by 2015 would be an epochal change in world trade patterns and would be unlikely in the best of circumstances. Rather, the President should aim for long term growth by reducing taxes and the regulatory burden imposed by a massive and growing Federal Register while seeking to dismantle foreign trade barriers that function as tariffs in all but name. The President does not understand economics, part three — and he’s indulging in cheap populism. The housing crisis and mortgage bubble that did so much to drag our national economy down in the past few years was encouraged by a web of regulations, mandates, and policies that drove lenders to bad risks. As those bad risks accumulated, the short-term rising market suppressed lenders’ remaining resistance to taking on still more. The result is the mess we have today — including a locked-up credit market. The President’s twofold response is as baffling as it is dangerous. First, he declared that taxpayers will “recoup” the money spent in resultant bailouts, by a special tax if needed. Rest assured you and I will not see a dime. Second, he announced that he will dedicate $30 billion “to help community banks give small businesses the credit they need to stay afloat.” Punitive taxation of financial institutions and encouraging their return to the lending practices that spurred the crash: it’s like dousing a fire with gasoline.

The President’s foreign policy is incoherent. Say what you will about the foreign policy of the previous Administration — this one is apparently bent upon making George W. Bush seem in retrospect the union of Metternich and Kissinger. Colombians, Panamanians, and South Koreans were doubtless surprised to hear the President endorse expanded trade with their nations, this, after he and his fellow Democrats spent the past several years sinking their respective free-trade agreements with the United States. Iranian students demanding to know why Obama has been virtually silent for months on their freedom struggle will be surprised to learn that his Administration “support[s] the human rights of the woman marching in the streets of Iran.” The Iranian mullahs were probably relieved at the gratifying non-specific nature of the consequences for their nuclear program. And the Taliban were doubtless heartened to hear the President reaffirm America’s planned disengagement from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011. A full accounting of the bad ideas, errors, and demagoguery in the President’s State of the Union Address would include all this, and more. President Obama doesn’t restrict himself to the appropriation and magnification of his predecessor’s mistakes: he has his own sui generis offerings. Again from his speech:

A bizarre and troubling stated envy of the political efficiency of countries like Germany, India, and yes, Communist China. A direct and fallacious attack on the Supreme Court of the United States, over the Citizens United decision — which will likely benefit Democrats more than Republicans for the foreseeable future due to the fact that unions overwhelmingly support Democrats while big business generally supports those in power.

A hypocritical attack on lobbyists, a class no one loves, but also one protected by the First Amendment — and one from which Barack Obama drew his Attorney General, his Secretary of Agriculture, his Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, his Domestic Policy Council Director, and too many other various czars and senior Administration officials.

An inaccurate declaration that “you can see the results of last year’s investments in clean energy,” when the results are in government-dependent jobs, not technological progress or lasting economic growth.

A pedestrian proclamation that he will now schedule regular meetings with legislative leaders.

A reinforcement of failure in the rhetorical commitment to pass an Obamacare bill that is almost certainly dead after the election of Scott Brown.

A condemnation of the years of his predecessor, which he sees as the font of America’s problems, but which Americans are increasingly remembering as “the good old days.” This, then, was Barack Obama’s first State of the Union Address. It wasn’t about our Union so much as it was about him, his Presidency, and why it’s floundering. President Obama wants the American people to know that things aren’t his fault: George W. Bush and the power of cynicism thwart his vision. Maybe Democrats believe that. Maybe Barack Obama believes it. There are no lies so powerful as the ones we tell ourselves.

But come November 2010, Democrats and the President both will find that the American people don’t believe it at all.

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