Obama and the state of confusion
If you tuned in on Tuesday night, you may have thought you were watching a rerun.
There it was, early in the president’s State of the Union address. Those old familiar words, which used to bring comfort to millions of Americans, but now seemed strangely out of place: “... the state of the Union is strong.”
That might have brought a chorus of “amens” if President Roosevelt had said so in 1945, or if President Reagan had said so in 1985, but when President Obama made the same declaration in 2015, it probably elicited more “ahems” than “amens.”
The lukewarm response from Montana’s Democratic Sen. Jon Tester probably summed up the enthusiasm level from even the party faithful.
“Tonight’s speech offers a starting point for Democrats and Republicans to work together to increase prosperity for middle class families and small businesses,” he said.
Well, maybe not so much, based on the responses from Republican Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Ryan Zinke.
Daines responded to the major domestic proposals by the president by saying that “Montanans don’t need more tax increases and more government spending — we need more good-paying jobs. If the president is serious about creating jobs and growing our economy, his first step would be approving the Keystone XL pipeline.”
But in the State of the Union speech, President Obama actually said that we should forget about this privately funded job-creating program and focus our attention instead on the federal government spending billions of dollars it doesn’t have on infrastructure projects. That’s an artificial solution to a real problem, and is just more Washington, D.C., politics as usual.
Will the Republicans be dumb enough to fall for it? Certainly possible, based on their track record of pandering for votes, but Rep. Zinke didn’t sound like he would go along.
“Rather than a tax-and-spend policy...,” he said, “we need to talk about what the engines of this economy are, which are the free enterprise system, creating opportunity, getting the anchor of government bureaucracy off and out, so small businesses can do well and prosper.”
As for foreign policy, the president seemed to be even further out of touch with the real world. In the same week when he released key terrorists from imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, he talked about making the world safe from terrorism, which in a politically correct nicety, he calls “the ideology of violent extremism” rather than jihad or Islamic fascism.
The president belittled a 50-year-long U.S. policy of containment of Cuba and thus gave comfort to an enemy of freedom just 90 miles off our shores. He cryptically spoke about Russia and Vladimir Putin as if he had somehow solved those urgent problems. Most worrisome of all, he talked about Iran as if he thought the United States could trust the Islamic republic’s promises to shelve its nuclear program ... with the right incentives.
All in all, the president’s performance was baffling. Perhaps, in his mind, everything really is better than it was six years ago, but the American public got to weigh in just three months ago during the midterm elections, and the forceful verdict then was that the state of the federal government led by Mr. Obama is not strong, but rather in a shambles.
Until he acknowledges that, there is little hope that he will work with the people’s Congress to solve the multitude of real problems we face. Our last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, had many weaknesses, but at least he had the wisdom to eventually admit when he was wrong and change course. There seems to be no such capacity for learning from his mistakes in President Obama.