The Sunshine Empire

Last night I had dinner at my parents house as I normally do on Wednesdays, and as I was leaving my dad was watching Countdown With Keith Olberman. I caught the middle of a Special Comment where he was recounting a rather defiant speech from FDR and was encouraging President Obama to come out in a defiant tone attacking his critics with all guns blazing. I agreed that I thought he should do that, to which my dad replied, “I don’t think that’s in his nature to give such a speech.” By the time I arrived home the speech had just started, and he seemed to take a different approach to isolating his Republican critics.

Here in the south, many of the President’s Republican critics perpetuate subtle urban myths about Mr. Obama. They say he caused the deficit, and that TARP was begun under his administration. It’s an amazing experience when you reveal actual facts to such people who hold such misconceptions. They believe the income redistribution meme that they heard during the campaign so they just assume Obama has raised taxes and was responsible for the trillion dollar deficit Bush ran in his last year of office. I told someone on Twitter that Obama had lowered taxes on 95% of people this past year and he came unglued as if I had claimed that Rosie O’Donnell was one of Tiger Wood’s mistresses.

It was in this air of misinformation that President Obama began the State Of The Union address last night. While he didn’t come out with guns blazing at his Republican critics he did rhetorically reveal their unprincipled disagreement with him on the basis of him and him only. If I had told you that a President would stand before that chamber and brag about the taxes he cut, the troop levels he tripled, and the spending cut he wanted to enact you would think that the GOP side of the chamber would be popping champagne corks with glee. Yet the Republican Congressional caucus sat on their hands when Democrat Barack H. Obama says those things. The moment of the night for me was when this:

“Now, let me repeat: We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families. (Applause.) We cut taxes for small businesses. We cut taxes for first-time homebuyers. We cut taxes for parents trying to care for their children. We cut taxes for 8 million Americans paying for college.”

When the Republicans did not cheer tax cuts, which the have told us for decades are the cure to any economic ill no matter what, the President added:

“I thought I’d get some applause on that one. (Laughter and applause.)”

It took the President pressing for more oil drilling and nuclear power to finally get a begrudging Republican caucus to arise for applause. Obama cannot get Republicans to agree with him when he agrees with them. He was combative in calling them out and even taking a shot at the Supreme Court to the faces of the Justices themselves. But regardless of your politics it was a feisty well delivered speech from the President that only briefly covered health care reform 25 minutes in, and had one mention to repeal the Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell policy for gays in the military. These two things were the only summery of the entire 70 minute speech from Fox News afterward. The radical right has ceased to argue rationally or even on the same plane of reality that the rest of us are on. That is why the speech began with an appeal to independents, then a call to progressives, with a sprinkling of mocking Republicans in between. The President seems to have asked himself the same question I did before the speech, what’s the point of engaging these people anymore?