Considering he’s known for taxpayer-funded “Obamaphones,” we shouldn’t be surprised that the president is phoning in his State of the Union addresses. In his latest column, Jonah Goldberg notes that “Six years later, Obama’s still reading from the same tired script,” and unlike say a vintage 1966 episode of the original Star Trek, it’s not a rerun worth watching:
This is Obama’s real understanding of “bipartisanship”; it is a political hack’s cudgel to unleash on your opponents, not a tool for governing. Diplomacy, Will Rogers once said, is the art of saying “nice doggie” until you can find a rock. Obama has a similar definition for gassy sound bites about cynicism.
His admirers see his speeches as ornate cathedrals of rhetoric when they are more like the kitsch from a TGI Friday’s, recycling old license plates and “gone fishin’” signs for that “authentic” feel. And just as every TGI Friday’s pretends it’s unique by adding a few bits of “flair” to the servers’ suspenders, what they dish out is always the same warmed-over swill drenched in cheesiness. So it is with Obama’s speeches.
Likewise with his policies. Before the financial crisis, Obama ran on “investing” in education, health care, renewable energy, infrastructure, and so on. After the financial crisis hit, presumably our needs changed, but not Obama’s agenda. Suddenly, what America needed to do to respond to the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was to again “invest” in education, health care, renewable energy, and infrastructure. And now that the “shadow of crisis has passed,” as he announced on Tuesday, the same investments are needed. Why? Because he said it before, of course.
The same holds true with his foreign-policy agenda. As a candidate, Obama vowed that we needed to pull back from the War on Terror. After the rise of the Islamic State and the metastasizing of jihadist terror around the world, we must stay the course. Even when events deviate from the president’s well-worn script, what matters is that the script never change so Obama can keep talking and talking and talking.
Armed with a sky-high pompadour and Sly-Stone’s muttonchop sideburns, Alfonzo Rachel of PJTV (with an introduction from a dapper-looking Pat Boone and an amazing kitchen-sink production job supervised by Roger L. Simon) had Mr. Obama’s number over four years ago:
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