After the media acclaim dies down, I think history will record that Obama’s State of the Union was abjectly derelict. With another $1 trillion–plus deficit on the horizon, he offered no meaningful way to reduce the debt but instead many ways to add to it.
He does not seem to get that he is facing in 2011 a perfect storm of sky-high energy prices, rising food prices, more 9.4 percent unemployment, astronomical budget deficits, the looming nightmare of the implementation of Obamacare, and a sinking dollar, and yet is still offering the old boilerplate about green this-and-that and the nefarious top 2 percent of the country. It is almost as if he is some sort of automaton that keeps up the preprogrammed sound bites even as the batteries weaken and it sputters out.