On the upcoming State of the Union address:
Well, the president has a choice. He can do a genuine pivot to the center the way that Bill Clinton did when he suffered a defeat early in his first term, or he can fake it.
I guess that he is going to attempt the second, and that is for two reasons. The first is that he is not a hostage of the party’s left, he is a man of the left. Clinton was a man of the center. He had long been in the DLC, which is the centrist faction of his party.
Obama is a man — Harvard faculty club, 20 years in the pew of Jeremiah Wright, a friend of William Ayers and Rashid Khalidi, the PLO propagandist. This is who he is and where he lived, and you saw it all in his agenda this year. It was a left-wing agenda.
But secondly, it’s a question of his vanity. He’s a man who believes that he can still do the magic. He’s a man who believes with his silver tongue he can talk ayatollahs into giving up nukes; with silver tongue he can talk America into believing you can expand health-care by 30 million people and cut costs at the same time.
And a man who said even last week after the Massachusetts defeat, it was because of insufficiency of communication with the American people. This is a guy who has been on the tube practically every night.
This is a man who I think will fake a pivot and will at least attempt it and see if it works. We saw a hint of that when he announced the [discretionary spending] freeze yesterday, which is in and of itself a phony and a fraud.
On New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement that he wants the KSM trial elsewhere:
The Republicans are going to save the president’s hide on this, because I think, in fact, when you get the mayor of New York today recommending that the trial be held elsewhere, you are beginning to get some cover.
You have got the introduction of a bill by a member of the Senate [Lindsey Graham] and member of the House [Frank Wolf] to actually cut off the funding, which is a way of Congress stepping in and preventing the trial.
I think if that happens, the administration will have dodged a bullet, because if the trial actually happens, and it will be a circus, it will be a propaganda disaster, and it will be a security nightmare. It would hurt the administration every day on the news broadcasts in the evening.
If it is averted by congressional action, it will be a single [public-relations] hit on the administration and it’s not going to be a constant drain. . . . So I think, in fact, that they are lucking out on being stopped from [carrying out] a really idiotic decision.