Thursday, January 26, 2012

The State of the Union Is Angry

What Obama and Gingrich have in common.

We were tired when we got home last night, too tired to pay much attention to the substance of President Obama's State of the Union Address. But we dutifully sat through all 65 minutes of it, and they made a strong emotional impression: This guy is angry. And it was a vigorous sort of anger, not the thin-skinned petulance to which this president has accustomed us. The tone was not whiny but combative. Obama reminded us of Newt Gingrich.


To be sure, there are some major differences between the president and the former speaker. For one, whereas many people argue that Gingrich is not electable, Obama proved in 2008 that he is.
Yet think about the emotional contrast between the Obama of 2008 and the Obama of last night. The former was hopeful and unifying--a friend dubbed him "Mr. Sunshine"--while the latter is furious and divisive. This Jekyll-and-Hyde-like description oversimplifies matters, of course; candidate Obama showed flashes of anger at times, and President Obama struck some unifying themes yesterday. But overall, the mood of this campaign is dark where that of 2008's was light.
Like Gingrich's anger, Obama's is sure to appeal to the most devoted partisans. But also like Gingrich's anger, we wonder if it will appeal to independents. At one point the president said: "I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right about now: Nothing will get done in Washington this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken."
Obama agreed that "Washington is broken." But that is, to say the least, an awkward slogan for an incumbent president. True, voters thought Washington was broken before Obama became president. Their reaction, in each of the three federal elections after George W. Bush's 2004 victory, has been to oust the party in power.
[botwt0126] Associated Press
Uh-oh, now he's really mad.
Last summer, as we noted in The Wall Street Journal, Obama hit something of a political nadir. Many of his supporters were depressed or enraged by his political weakness and what they saw as his ideological inconstancy. If he is to win re-election, it is necessary--although not sufficient--to turn this anger outward at Republicans. "Yes, many are disappointed in Obama," observes Democratic operative Carter Eskew on the Washington Post website, "but [they] are beginning to perceive it isn't all his fault and that the alternative is much worse. Perhaps we are entering a more productive stage of grief."
How's that for a bumper sticker: "A more productive stage of grief: Re-elect the president."
Democrats, of course, were always going to be stuck with Obama as their nominee this year. They have to be relieved that he's now coming across as a fighter rather than a loser. A fighter at least has a chance at winning.
Republicans, on the other hand, have to choose between the scrappy Gingrich and the more complaisant Mitt Romney. The contrast between the two is most evident in their descriptions of the president, whom Gingrich calls a dangerous radical and Romney describes as a nice guy in over his head. To our mind, Obama is neither as dangerous as Gingrich suggests nor as nice as Romney says. But the important thing about these statements is what they tell us about the men making them and the character of the campaign each is likely to run.
Obama has long had very poor approval ratings among independent voters, which ought to make him easy to defeat. Obama's angry appeal is not going to win over unhappy independents. The great imponderable is whether Gingrich's anger would put them off and thereby neutralize Obama's--or, to put it another way, whether independent voters are fed up enough with Obama to respond to Gingrich's angry appeal the way Republicans do.
Funny Money
All right, one quick word about the SOTU substance. Look at this passage:
In the next few weeks, I will sign an executive order clearing away the red tape that slows down too many [federally funded] construction projects. But you need to fund these projects. Take the money we're no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.
"The money we're no longer spending at war" is a fiction. It is money that has never been collected or borrowed and won't have to be because there is (touch wood) no war to fight. It's like a wife demanding that her husband buy her an expensive gift with the money she saved by not buying herself something even more expensive. Does Obama really think Americans foolish enough to fall for this?
Longest Books Ever Written
"The State of the Union: What Obama Doesn't Get About America"--headline, TheAtlantic.com, Jan. 25
Sour Headline of the Day (Though We Only Skimmed the Story)
"Obama's Milk Joke 2 Percent Funny"--headline, Politico.com, Jan. 25
An Exhortation, Not a Fact
Predictably enough, the Associated Press has a "fact check" of the State of the Union Address. Also predictably, it has a high bunk content. Here's our favorite item:
Obama: "We can also spur energy innovation with new incentives. The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change. But there's no reason why Congress shouldn't at least set a clean energy standard that creates a market for innovation."
The Facts: With this statement, Obama was renewing a call he made last year to require 80 percent of the nation's electricity to come from clean energy sources by 2035, including nuclear, natural gas and so-called clean coal. He did not put that percentage in his speech but White House background papers show that it remains his goal.
But this Congress has yet to introduce a bill to make that goal a reality, and while legislation may be introduced this year, it is unlikely to become law with a Republican-controlled House that loathes mandates.
It seems to us that it is obvious to any informed reader that the last sentence in the president's statement is hortatory, not analytical. If we are right about that, then the AP reporters are deliberately misconstruing it in order to offer what purports to be a factual rebuttal.
But note too how the AP goes about this. "There is no reason," Obama says, to which the AP replies that he has his facts wrong--that there is a reason, and that the reason is Republican obstructionism. The AP is pretending to hold the president to account while actually making a political argument on his behalf.
White Guilt Death Watch
"A group of about two dozen Duke University students urged administrators Tuesday to create a better climate and provide more financial support for black students, saying they've been disappointed so far in how top officials have reacted to their viewpoints," the Associated Press reports from Durham, N.C.:
The students, almost all of whom were black, unsuccessfully sought a meeting with university President Richard Brodhead at his campus office in hopes of explaining a document they describe as a call to action for the prestigious school.
A reader sent us this story with the comment "Race is still a useful tool in academia," presumably in response to our Monday observation that "white guilt is dying." But we think it bolsters our point. If this were 1968, the students would probably have stormed into the university president's office and issued their demands, prompting him to fold immediately. Now he won't even take a meeting with them.
Meanwhile, the Wilmington News Journal reports on a Delaware racial kerfuffle:
Critics say the Delaware Historical Society cannot adequately tell the story of Delaware's African Americans. The recent announcement that the society received a $1 million grant to establish an African-American Heritage Center in downtown Wilmington has stirred the controversy. . . .
While saying race was not part of the issue, [former Wilmington mayor Jim] Sills does not believe that the Delaware Historical Society can do the job because it lacks diversity.
"I think a white person can do it," Sills said. "I think a black person can do it better, because of that black person's history. That black person is more likely to bring more of a commitment to it, more likely to bring more passion to it, because a black person has lived the experience and can identify with it more than any person from any other race."
Bradley Skelcher, associate provost and a professor of history at Delaware State University, agreed that a good historian should be able to tell the African-American story regardless of his or her race. Trained historians are obligated to do research in a scholarly manner and tell the history in a scholarly fashion, he said.
"Where the African-American experience comes alive is by engaging the African-American community in this process of gathering that history," he said, adding that if the historian happens to be an African American presenting black history it enriches the storytelling.
If there were some reason to think that the Delaware Historical Society was biased against blacks, the concern would be well-founded. Armenian-American groups, for instance, have a strong case when they complain about Turkish government funding of American scholarship about the conduct of the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
But it would be ridiculous to insist because Armenians were oppressed in that era, only Armenians were fully qualified to study the history. And no one would say that non-Americans are less qualified to study American history, or Northerners to study the history of the South. The notion that being black is a qualification to study black history is just another variant on white guilt.
How to Thwart Brown and Warren
Yesterday we criticized Sen. Scott Brown and his challenger, Elizabeth Warren, for entering into a pact designed to suppress political speech concerning their Massachusetts election race. Reader Jeff Mallian has some thoughts on how to thwart the effort:
It seems to me that this "pact" sets up the easiest method to destroy the opposition. If I pay for millions of dollars in ads supporting Scott Brown, he will then be forced to exhaust his campaign treasury, either in legal fees to fight the "pact," or in mandated donations to charities of Ms. Warren's choice. If the ads are sufficiently compromising but still "tend to support" Brown, or "are run in his name,' it's pretty much MAD [mutually assured destruction] all over again.
In an editorial, the New York Sun floats a similar idea:
Now, Karl Rove is smarter than we are--we make that stipulation with genuine admiration--but our instinct is that the right move would be for him to announce that he will spend a fortune in the Massachusetts race supporting Scott Brown and attacking Mrs. Warren. And then to go ahead and spend that fortune. It would be a service to the people of Massachusetts, not to mention, given the reach of a senator's impact, the people of the rest of the country, who have such an enormous stake in the Massachusetts race.
True, it would also saddle the Brown campaign with a debt to the charities Mrs. Warren names. And she or her "People's Campaign" may pick the League for Unwed Communists or the North Korea Children's Social Welfare Fund. The key point is that to make the advertising buy vastly more than Scott Brown or his campaign could ever possibly pay. That would force the Unwed Communists or the North Korean Children's Welfare Fund--both, if they exist at all, no doubt fronts for the Party--to try to collect. Mrs. Warren will be tied up for years in court and might net the charities one used pickup truck.
Of course, another way for Mr. Rove to handle the situation would be to spend millions on television ads in support of Mrs. Warren. It'll be hard thinking of reasons to vote for her, but one could come up with something (maybe "we need more lawyers in Washington"). Mr. Rove could put his own smiling face--and Mr. Brown's--on the ads just to underline how important Mrs. Warren's victory is to him. In any event, Mrs. Warren's campaign will have to disgorge half that fortune to charities that Scott Brown favors, like the National Pickup Truck Museum and the Massachusetts Hockey Puck Parade.
This is very clever, but it strikes us as far too clever to justify actually spending money on--especially if Rove agrees with us that Brown, by agreeing to this pernicious pact, has made himself less worthy of re-election.
Why Didn't Larry Craig Think of That?
"So [reporter John] Hanna tracked down a legislative source he thought would be helpful--and he found him in a men's room at the Capitol. He asked for the data and the source replied, 'If you'd just let me finish my business here, we can go to my office.' Back in the office, the source showed Hanna what the research staff had given his boss and provided to a special study group--the first time any reporter had seen it."--Associated Press press release, Jan. 24
Other Than That, the Story Was Accurate
"The Phony Crisis of Capitalism: I'm the college student Nick Kristof cited as evidence that students have turned socialist. He's wrong."--headline and subheadline, Slate.com, Jan. 24
Metaphor Alert
"Until we remove the scales from our eyes and launch our discourse toward the future, our politics will remain sterile."--Walter Russell Mead, The-American-Interest.com, Jan. 24

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