Still Waiting on the First Pivot
At present response rates, it looks like only two of the five Ordinary Gentlemen I polled about the State of the Union address last night actually watched or otherwise consumed what some have called the most important speech of this President’s short time in office. It’s the State of the Union, it’s supposed to be a big deal, right? And yet currently, less than fifty percent of us bothered to tune in (and I have my doubts about the other three who have yet to respond).
Why is that? I mean, you’re talking about wanna be pundits here. We’re guys who spend not insignificant amounts of time writing posts about politics and culture free of charge because… well, for a variety of reasons. But the point is, we spend a lot of time writing on this site, so why would we, as Will termed it, commit the blogger mortal sin and fail to watch the State of the Union address?
Reasons vary, but the general theme is we had better things to do. But this is the State of the Union!!! And we’re aspiring bloggers!!! There was nothing better to do than watch this and live blog it, right?! Except that I don’t think most of us placed much stock in what went down last night because this just in: Barack Obama gives good speech.
The President was bound to give a good speech last night. We’ve collectively been watching his every move for the past three-ish years and I defy anyone to point to a bad speech given by the President. Sure you can point to better and worse speeches, but they’re all good speeches. The President’s oratory skills have never been in question and anyone who tells you different is lying.
But, what we don’t need right now is another good speech. I suppose that it doesn’t hurt, sure, but I can’t help agreeing with Jamelle’s assessment from last night at US Jamerica,
This isn’t a new observation, but right now, Obama’s core weakness is that he hasn’t passed a single piece of significant legislation. On the core issues of his presidency — health care, financial reform, the environment — he has yet to secure a single victory. Which, as Ned points out, makes it very difficult to embrace Obama’s rhetoric, even when you want to. And pace Obama, it’s not that liberals or young people or any other part of his coalition believed that he would wave the magical change wand and solve America’s problems. But we did expect Obama to use his gifts — as an orator and a leader — to push and fight for the policies he promised to deliver. That he hasn’t, that he effectively allowed Democrats “to run for the hills” following the Massachusetts election, has made many liberals uneasy about Obama’s commitment to his own agenda.
I’m actually happy to go one step down from Jamelle, I would be inclined to go a whole lot easier on the President if I just got the sense that he was getting into it around some of the key promises he made on the campaign trail instead of letting the Congress and Senate, who have already demonstrated they are not in possession of the wherewithal to pass meaningful legilsation on their own, frankenstein bad ideas together into an outcome with which no one is pleased and resting on the laurels of the Recovery Act.
And look, the Recovery Act was a good thing insofar as it succeeded in stopping an even worse meltdown. The President should be given credit for getting that work done in an expedient manner. But one wonders where the oomf went after that, where the sense of urgency has gone. It might be true that no one felt the same kind of pressing doom that sped stimulus spending through the gauntlet, but speed isn’t necessarily what we’re talking about here. What I’m looking for is the same kind of dogged determination to get the job done and I’ve seen more of that from the likes of Chuck Schumer than I have Barack Obama. Democrats and the country needed Obama to maintain that focus and his failure to do so is fair game for criticism in my books — no amount of great sppechifying will change that.
And while Chris might be right that the President tends to be more outwardly focused on foreign policy and the like,this President has spent no small amount of time on domestic issues — rightly so by many lights — so I think it behooves us to apply some accountability to that focus rather than sluff it off with a “not my job” excuse.
A lot of epople have talked about how President Obama is engaged in the “economic pivot”, something that he and his administration have been planning for some time. Reading over the text of the speech (no YouTube at work now so I have yet to watch the speech), I’m still waiting for the first and most important of all pivots: the pivot from running for election to being in office. As I read over the State of the Union text, I feel like I’m reliving the campaign — the soaring rhetoric, the benevolent deference to the American people, the knowledge that things have never come easy but that we must perservere.
I could be in North Carolina.
But we’re not in North Carolina and it isn’t 2008. We’re in the middle of a bloody mess and it’s 2010 and we’ve finally realized that there will be no port in this storm, we’ve got to keep paddling and shift the direction of our sails on the fly. There’s work to be done and it won’t be pretty or awe inspiring, but it still needs to be done.
As if on cue, Christopher Buckley writes about how he and those he watched the speech with were moved by one hell of a speech,
Tonight Mr. Obama proved—once again—that he hears the American music and can play it like a maestro. As well as Ronald Reagan. Both presidents had—have—have music in their souls. The other people in the room where I watched the speech were in tears by the end—the kind that stream down the face. I managed to hold those back. But I could not hold back my admiration at the performance, in particular of Mr. Obama’s deep humanity, as evinced by his profound, almost Lincolnesque humor. Oh dear, are tears streaming down my face, one way or the other?
And, of course, Mr. Buckley remains supremely capable of deeply emoting through the inert medium of words, a skill for which he is renowned and admired. But Buckley’s response is just so off, it’s just so 2008 — he’s there in North Carolina too, weeping and being terribly inspired by it all.
This is the dark side of the wave that swept Obama to office. This is the Facebookization of political discourse. It’s all about the instant gratification, the oohs and ahhhs, the pretty-pretty. Click, I’ve just become a member of the “America” group. Look, I care. I am affected. I am inspired. That’s all I have to do, right? That’s the change we’ve been waiting for, right?
No, if we’re the change we’ve been waiting for — and on some level I continue to believe that we are, or at least can be — then we all have a role to play, Obama included. If many of the young people who cane out in droves for the President have opted out of the process early, they cannot be entirely to blame — it feels like they took their cue in part from their candidate. We all have to get over our love of being inspired and turn that inspiration into perspiration. At some point, we have to stop talking about the work in front of us and, you know, do the work in front of us.
Can we do it? Yes we can.
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31 comments
What speech was Christopher Buckley watching that moved him to tears? I want to watch that speech. Unfortunately, I watched the 2010 State of the Union Address. The speech I watched was half an hour too long, unstatesmanlike, pedantic, periodically obviously based on untruths or flagrant distortions of the truth, approached legislative priorities with the discrimination of a medium-range shotgun blast, oddly technocratic without containing much by way of policy specifics, and worst of all, bloodless and uninspiring.
SOTU 2010 ranks appreciably below the “mediocre” mark, particularly for a public speaker of Barack Obama’s well-demonstrated ability. He can do better and I hope that when the occasion for him to give a truly rousing, inspiring speech, he rises to it. I give it a “C” in the sense that it conveyed some of the President’s basic humanity and his sense of irony at his reversal of political fortunes from twelve months ago, but it just didn’t have the “oomph” of a really good Barack Obama speech. The rhetoric did not soar, it kind of plopped. I left frustrated and unclear about what part exactly Congress was supposed to play in making things better — and indeed, with the distinct impression that no one had found a road map to better times in the White House, either.
Those among you Ordinaries who found better things to do last night did well for yourselves.
North
January 28th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
Would you mind providing some examples of the untruths and distorted truths (and specify which is what)? I must have missed them.
historystudent
January 28th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Perhaps this will help?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100128/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_fact_check
Transplanted Lawyer
January 28th, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Maybe your taxes have gone down, North, but mine haven’t. They’re up, not a lot, but they are up. Yes, those are Federal taxes I’m talking about. And I don’t make over $250K a year, much as I wish I did.
Maybe you think an inflation-indexed spending freeze on 23% of the Federal budget that won’t start for eighteen months is taking deficit reduction seriously. While it’s better than nothing, I guess, it’s not something I consider meaningful, especially not when I’m told that we must, right now, “invest” in tons of infrastructure, health care reform, increased home loan subsidies, and student loan reforms. A case can be made that these are necessary sorts of things for the government to do right now, but you can’t make that case and say that deficit reduction is a priority, at least not as part of the same overall policy proposals.
Maybe you’re irritated by the Citizens United decision but it doesn’t mean there can’t be meaningful ways to control campaign finance, nor does it mean that we must necessarily betray the idea of free political speech in the name of fighting corruption. That’s as much a false choice as the false choice between security and liberty.
Maybe you really believe we’re going to have every American soldier out of Iraq by August of this year. But we’re there to stay, perhaps under cover of peaceful-sounding terms like “partners” or “advisors” or “sponsors” or “logistical support.”
I further commend you to the AP report linked by @historystudent.
zic
January 29th, 2010 at 9:00 am
Are you single?
Jaybird
January 29th, 2010 at 9:01 am
Blushing, I ran to this comment to see if it were directed towards me.
Sadly, no.
Kyle
January 28th, 2010 at 3:25 pm
‘That’s what I came to Washington to do. That’s why – for the first time in history – my Administration posts our White House visitors online. And that’s why we’ve excluded lobbyists from policy-making jobs or seats on federal boards and commissions.”
If I had been eating I might’ve choked. Yes, they’ve excluded the lobbyists…that they haven’t waived. Also, the White House went from not posting visitors…to posting some visitors…to posting visitors staring late last year but not retroactively….it’s like the sliding scale of transparency.
What frustrates me is that I’m smart enough to not care who visits the White House but I do care that he tries to insinuate that this is a.) something that matters enough to be laudable and b.) implying that his record on this barometer of transparency is better than it actually is.
Then of course there’s the 100 years of jurisprudence…which is more like 30.
I’m nitpicky enough to say that while victory was far from assured at Bull Run, by Omaha beach the writing was on the wall for Nazi Germany.
Mostly though, I credit that to the fact that Favreau chooses vivid language over accurate or consistent language.
Kyle
January 28th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
I will say I enjoyed how he took credit for leaving Iraq on the same timetable the Bush administration agreed to. He’s call on Congress to repeal DADT is great, though it’d have more weight had the White House not actively asked Congress to shelve the measure last year.
It’s really hard sometimes to reconcile an enjoyable speech given by a likable person with the really thin evidence the White House uses to justify its claims and/or poorly fact checked things like “43 presidents before me.”
North
January 28th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Thanks to you both!
Mark Thompson
January 28th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
As one of the Ordinaries who actually did watch network television between 9 PM and 10:30 PM, I will say that I rather enjoyed this year’s version of the SOTU Drinking Game. Well, at least the first two beers….after that, even the Drinking Game became soulless and I had to quit. Mostly, my wife and I obsessed over the apparent decision by the backfield (aka, the Veep and the Speaker) to coordinate their outfits.
I will say that I thought the jokes at the Republicans were effective, if only because they made the Republicans laugh knowingly in response rather than booing and shouting in protest….the GOP’s responsive laughter proved Obama’s points. They’d have been better off just not laughing at all.
Roque Nuevo
January 28th, 2010 at 2:48 pm
You forgot “demagogic.” His calling out of the Supreme Court as a threat to democracy was unprecedented to use one of Obama’s favorite words. His doing so based on lies and distortions of the truth was nothing short of Goebbels’s big lie strategy. And he’s the constitutional lawyer!
This is the change we’ve been waiting for: a yuppie metrosexual president to whom everything reduces to rhetorical style.
Rufus
January 28th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
I, for one, think it’s time that metrosexuals were allowed to openly serve their country.
Mark Thompson
January 28th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Meh. I think Jonathan Adler’s got the right perspective on that:
http://volokh.com/2010/01/28/lithwick-on-alito-the-sotu/
….Although I’m not certain that sitting Justices ought ever to be attending the SOTU at all – it’s too much of an inherently political event. Alito’s actions were entirely understandable under the circumstances and I don’t blame him for reacting in that way, especially given the inaccuracy of the accusations, but they also didn’t help the increasingly poor perception of the Court’s independence.
North
January 28th, 2010 at 3:01 pm
No Alito was perfectly entitled to disagree, it was only by a fluke of a clever cameraman that it became an issue at all. Tempest in a teacup.
Mark Thompson
January 28th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
No doubt, but still…the concept of judicial independence is an important one, and I’d rather people weren’t talking so much about Alito v. Obama in this context. It seems there’s a tempest in a teacup every year over some aspect of the SOTU, and I’d rather that SCOTUS justices didn’t put themselves in a position where their names might get caught up in that tempest. There’s not really much reason for the SCOTUS justices to attend – no one seems to miss them when they don’t, after all.
North
January 28th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
No arguement from me Mark. But Justices get to parade around in their robes so infrequently. The poor dears should be allowed to at least be taken for regular walks.
Mark Thompson
January 28th, 2010 at 3:40 pm
North, FTW!
Jaybird
January 28th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
The problem is that if 5 justices decide to go and 4 decide to not go, the assumption will be that the 4 are somehow opposed to whatever the people assume the president is for.
And, probably, that they’re playing cards while laughing about colluding against his (or her… fingers crossed!) agenda.
Mark Thompson
January 28th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Slightly O/T, Jay, but a quote I just came across for a post I’m working on:
“The process of our democracy must not be imperiled by the denial of essential powers of free government.”
FDR, 1937 SOTU, attacking the Supreme Court for finding his programs unconstitutional. Shortly thereafter, the court-packing bill was pursued. But I figured that quote would just make your head spin – “essential powers of a free government.”
Jaybird
January 28th, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Too late. It started spinning when you said “FDR”.
Roque Nuevo
January 28th, 2010 at 7:32 pm
People are talking about Obama v. the Supreme Court because of Obama’s demagogic pronouncements. Alito did not have anything to do with it, except that he was caught by an alert cameraman as he reacted with his gut to Obama’s demagogy. Obama’s distortions of the SC decision in question must have hit all the justices in the gut as well. Alito had the bad luck to be on camera at the time and to have lost control of his facial movements, a la Winston Smith (1984). He suddenly lost the required look of quiet satisfaction required of him. For that, he’ll be a hero to a lot of people. It was not planned, but his was as devastating a putdown of Obama’s golden rhetoric as could ever be devised by any communications scientist, or whatever. When saw the snippet, I thought, “score one for the Bushitler, after his taking abuse for so long.” I’m sure he laughed out loud.
It doesn’t matter why the justices sit at the State of the Union. The fact is that they were there and had to take Obama’s ridiculous demagogy sitting down, as it were. So, along with being a metrosexual yuppie demagogue, Obama is just a coward for landing a sucker punch in such a manner, in front of the Congress and the American people.
My conclusion: Obama is through. That’s what happens to cowards who land sucker punches. See the Japanese, 1941-45; al Qaeda, 2001, etc etc.
Rufus
January 28th, 2010 at 9:28 pm
Well, just so long as we don’t lose our sense of perspective.
Roque Nuevo
January 28th, 2010 at 9:57 pm
Good one! Thanks
Two thoughts:
1) Hear, hear. I think the sentiments that you express here are a pretty good encapsulation of the disenchanment that a lot of us are feeling. Yes, yes. Good rhetoric. Charming, charismatic mien. Seems like a nice guy. Good ideas. Now, do something.
2) If you Gents are “aspiring” bloggers, and already have found yourselves on Sully’s blogroll, that makes me incredibly depressed. (Thankfully, I have a fortifying cup of tea already brewed.)
North
January 28th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
I’m not certain but I think that the august Sullivans gaze came here following Freddie much like Saurons baleful gaze always was following that ring. I have faith though that Sully would have a cooler tower and snazzier minions.
Don’t take this as snark, but I have to ask if this line, “This is the Facebookization of political discourse. It’s all about the instant gratification, the oohs and ahhhs, the pretty-pretty” was at all motivated by all of those anti-proroguing protests drawing only about 5 or 6% of the people that joined the Facebook group.
It is just my observation !
It would appear that the vast majority of the Rebuplican following, would sell their birth right for the greater, rebuplican, good. The scripted virtues that are towted across the united states of america, are seemingly nothing more than a collection of, old, power and wealth preservation techniques.
Control, manipulation, Deception, divisiveness(divide and conquer), and a seeries of old system and societal control techniques were blatantly rejected by the american people.
I am neither for or against either party but i acknowledge the serious flaws of both, and on this day choose to address those of the republican party!
You seem to enjoy hitting your heads up against a wall!
A blind man on a trotting horse would have seen, given that speech lastnight, that Barrack Obama is a “highly intelligent Man” to quote a republican off CNN Larry King. Not just a good talker! everybody knows he is able to deliver his speeches well and effectively because he prepares them himself for the most part and knows what exactly he wishes to conveyand to whom! unlike the numerous folks who follow along mindlessly with the tide of the status quo!
Barrack obama’s critical flaw is not unlike many highly intellectual people ! He is a horrible judge of character!He does not yet understand that his optimistic goals will require more than diplomacy and human decency!
they will require some strategy, proactiveness, some fore thought and an understanding that we are all equal
but we are not all the same and understand and learn and hate in different ways most learn by example and few by rhetoric!
So Brilliant speech Obama! Horrible and revealing rebuttal republicans!
Please revisit your respective drawing boards and give us some reasonable entertainment because otherwise the next UFC match is about to begin and that is little less predictable!
Just a thot
Oh i might add i must apologize in advance as i could not find a picture of another brown guy to include with my message so it may lack that political flavour that the brown fella pic above! would insight!
While we are reviewing obvious moments did anyone notice the two(2) brown children, potentially, elementary students that were seated in the front row among, the Blatantly obvious, GOP congregation. Amidst what is supposed to be a serious response to the SOTU address!
Just an observation!
my god
Not that speeces matter, but I’ve yet to be impressed with Obama’s speeches, and last night was a low point for him. One of the characteristics of a good leader is the ability to touch a diverse audience at a depth common to all — you can almost call it a spiritual connection, a synthesis of mental and emotional which creates a deep appreciation for the speaker regardless of politics. Obama appeals to a limited group of progressives, and some moderates who admire pant creases, although moderates are getting their fill of superficiality. There’s a disconnected, above-it-all aspect to Obama’s speeches which make it obviously pretentious to those who don’t agree with his ideology and aren’t blinded to his faults. The pretentiousness is almost humorous in a theater of the absurd fashion — sort of like a Beckett character out of The End Game or Waiting on Godot.
sloppy, sloppy — that would be — Endgame and Waiting for Godot.