President Barack Obama delivered his constitutionally-mandated State of the Union address yesterday to a packed gallery filled with Members of Congress and guests and millions of observers watching on television and online.
Obama focused on his campaign themes and used the powerful bully pulpit of the presidency to re-iterate them. His remarks echoed his speech a few weeks ago in Osawatomie, Kans., in which the president began his class warfare strategy on the wealthiest Americans under the guises of “fairness” and some notion of a “square deal.”
Rhetorically, Obama poorly attempted a throwback of John F. Kennedy’s anaphora, in which Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, in which he repeated “Let both sides…” to open several paragraphs. Obama said “Send me” in the context of urging Congress to send him various bills or measures to bolster his plans. Not only did these words probably fall on the deaf ears of Congressional leaders, but it was also rhetorically ineffective. The president could have made this anaphora meaningful by actually grouping the repetition together, like Kennedy did, instead of stringing the paragraphs together loosely and with much space in between. The idiom was a cheap political tactic rather than a shrewd speechmaking one.
In addition, Obama detailed his plans would be a “blueprint meant to last” – more like a blueprint fit for a billion-dollar campaign meant to firmly establish four more years of Obama dominance. He also sounded bitter and scathing when he delivered the lines that a unionized plant in Milwaukee has turned around its fate. In a line only a few moments later, he said with dreamlike incredulity that some fools wanted to see American car companies collapse and go under, instead of seeing the federal government bail these corporations out and pay their bills. This, of course, is a direct dig against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney who advocated the market failure of these companies in 2009. Thus, we can see with demonstrable evidence that the State of the Union speech was a campaign stump speech in addition to a weak policy address.
The GOP response to the speech, delivered by a man who should be running for president himself, Indiana conservative governor Mitch Daniels, was a resoundingly different view of what America could be. He derided Obama for pitting certain groups of Americans against one another and said that the leader of the free world cannot insult one group while attempting to curry favor with another. The best quote, which represents a conservative vision of America’s current troubles, is this: “As in previous moments of national danger, we Americans are all in the same boat. If we drift, quarreling and paralyzed, over a Niagara of debt, we will all suffer, regardless of income, race, gender, or other category. If we fail to shift to a pro-jobs, pro- growth economic policy, there’ll never be enough public revenue to pay for our safety net, national security, or whatever size government we decide to have.”
