President Obama Outdoes Bill Clinton: Thoughts After The State of the Union Address

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When President Obama Denounces Excess Government Regulation, He’s Preaching Temperance From The Bar Stool

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State of the Union addresses, while constitutionally required, have become an exercise in Presidential grandiosity and dreaming.  They are now a wish-list of what the President wants and would get if he were a monarch that didn’t have to ask a legislature for approval.  But since the U.S. form of government makes congressional approval of most things mandatory, the best a President can do is step before Congress once a year and give an inflated list of wants with the hope that a fraction of them will be granted.  Along the way, he also throws some verbal pies in the faces of his audience, usually at the other party.  And as this is an election year, what better way to kick off the campaign and take some of his themes out for a spin?

In that regard, President Obama lived up to this dumbed-down modern standard for State of the Union addresses last Tuesday night.

He started out by re-affirming his commander-in-chief status by telling of a recent trip to Andrews Air Force Base to welcome some of our troops to serve in Iraq.  This served the dual purpose of contradicting his critics who say he doesn’t care about the military while reminding his liberal wing that he ended our military involvement in Iraq: a Liberal Cause Célèbre.

He then went on to chide congress in general, and Republicans implicitly, that we should work together with the same “get-it-done” attitude that the military does.  This sounds great but congress is not the U.S. military, thankfully, or we would’ve been overrun by the enemy long ago.  And when Mr. Obama implored us to “imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their [the military’s] example,” he was asking us to imagine what accomplishing his agenda would look like, not any of the Republicans’ goals.

There were lines that did not need a laugh track such as when he called for “a future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world.”  When I last checked, Mr. Obama nixed the XL pipeline (20,000 “shovel-ready” jobs) from that rogue country, Canada.

Mr. Obama then proceeded to play historian and tutor us about the World War II generation who returned home from combat and “built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known.”  He failed to mention that they did that without the welfare society that would erupt in the mid-1960s.

After lamenting the contraction of manufacturing and loss of jobs because of technology (he mercifully did not call for the horse and buggy industry to be brought back via government subsidy), he went on to say that “the state of our Union is getting stronger.”  With a net loss of one million jobs since he became President, I would prefer his other slogan of “it could be worse.”

Onward he plodded to state he intends to fight obstruction with action and oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place. Translation: his way or the highway.

Then he took a trip down memory lane and gloated over the auto industry bailout.  He said “tonight, the American auto industry is back.” I wonder what the stockholders of old GM and Chrysler, who were wiped out in a political bankruptcy that put the unions ahead of them, would say about such a “success story.”

The President then went on to have a conversion on the tax road to D.C. but unsurprisingly, Mr. Obama was more concerned about bringing taxable income back from foreign countries than addressing the carve-outs motivated by social engineering (mortgage interest, solar credits) or the double-taxation that corporations must pay in the U.S.

The President then moped over our energy dependence and its cost.  He concluded that “the easiest way to save money is to waste less energy.” His solution was, not surprisingly, costly upgrades and mercifully not cardigan sweaters, a la Jimmy Carter.

The knee-slapper of the night, though, had to go to the President bemoaning government regulation.  He lamented “there’s no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly.”  He went on to say “I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his.”  When he referred to “Republican predecessor,” did he mean President Rutherford B. Hayes? It should also be noted, even if he conveniently did not, that the full impact of ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank have yet to be felt and those will be blow-outs when regulations are ready for the Presidential signature.  Mr. Obama was clearly preaching temperance from the barstool.

Which gets us to Mr. Obama’s overall approach to the Presidential campaign and election this year.

Mr. Obama is unquestionably a big government Liberal who can’t imagine a program that he would not like. And he has governed as such throughout his first term.  Anyone who would disagree with him, including his own deficit commission, is either summarily dismissed as crazy or ignored.  Even Bill Clinton, ever the wet-fingered politician checking the prevailing political winds and public mood, course-corrected and even claimed ownership in government reforms that were of a conservative nature (think: welfare reform). But not Mr. Obama.  As he said in an interview, he would “rather be a really good one-term President than a mediocre two-term President.”  As he clearly sees being a good President as one who expands government’s role in life, there is every reason to believe that, if re-elected, he will continue the extraordinary encroachment of government on society, regardless of what President (and more accurately, “Candidate”) Obama says in a speech before congress or on the campaign trail.

-I.M. Windee


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