Obama's Maddening, Winning Speech

He will marginalize his opponents as the bloodless Numbers People.

• By DANIEL HENNINGER

Barack Obama's poorly received State of the Union speech deserves a second look. Conventional wisdom pronounced the SOTU a relatively weak Obama effort. It was. Diffuse, filled with the usual enemies, it pulled together various back-filed policy ideas into a proposal he called, with a straight face, "An Economy Built to Last."
Bemused election-year observers remarked that both ObamaCare and the nation's entitlement bomb passed unmentioned. In his reply, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels noted that we are not going to be able to outrun the simple math on entitlement spending. That's true. We can't. But Mr. Obama just may for the next 10 months.

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President Obama speaks at Intel's plant in Chandler, Ariz.

How? By exploiting political vulnerabilities in the Republicans' case against his presidency. Republicans think it's all about the bad economy. It is. But Barack Obama is going to do something his opposition wouldn't think possible. He's going to take ownership of the American economy. Not the real one, but the one he's just made up, "the economy built to last." It won't last long, but long enough.
In the days after his Washington lecture, Mr. Obama took a shorter version of his SOTU speech on the road—to Colorado, Michigan, Iowa, Nevada and Arizona, states he needs in November. On the White House website, you can see him give this campaign tuneup speech at the new, $5 billion Intel chip-fabrication plant in Chandler, Ariz. It's worth watching and pondering. You'd think the best and the brightest would be beyond Mr. Obama's crude populist pitch. You of course would be wrong.
About 6,000 Intel employees—young, well-educated technology sophisticates—applauded and cheered Mr. Obama from start to finish. Even when he ripped into those awful American companies with factories overseas, such as their own employer. "An America where we build stuff and make stuff and sell stuff all over the world." (Applause.)
A speech that flopped among Washington's policy sophisticates is soaring out in the country. Republicans had better figure out why.
Reading through the White House's text of "An Economy Built to Last," any half-awake citizen will notice the words that fail to appear: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, entitlements and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The deficit is in the document's last paragraph, three sentences long.
Gilda Radner's Emily Litella famously said "Never mind," and you would too if you had to run on this economy. Thus, the Obama solution: Run against the economy. This effectively means Mr. Obama is running against himself, but . . . never mind.

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He will marginalize his opponents as the bloodless Numbers People.

Mr. Obama may not know much about the private economy, but he knows a lot about the uses of human anxiety. Proposing to replace his own bad economy with a virtual substitute "built to last" allows Mr. Obama to place himself outside the White House and on the street making common cause with the genuine economic anxieties of the American people. It also lets this president put in motion what he thinks he knows best—empathy. In "The Audacity of Hope" he put empathy "at the heart of my moral code." Practice makes perfect.
It is beyond audacious. How can a president simultaneously hammer real job creation with the Keystone XL pipeline decision, then go into the country and claim kinship with the anxieties of the jobless? No problem. Just do it.
It could work. If we know nothing else about Barack Obama it is that he can play "hope" like a Stradivarius. The version of "An Economy Built to Last" that he performed at Intel is his concerto for re-election.
The Obama-Axelrod-Plouffe team knows that the Republicans instinctively will respond by quoting, endlessly, the poor economic data of the Obama years. They plan to turn this reality on its head as well. In a down economy, Barack Obama is going to position his GOP critics as economic determinists. The bloodless Numbers People. The tea party, by its own admission, obsesses over "the deficit"—numbers. Mr. Obama's likely opponent has self-defined as a competent manager, a numbers guy. That false Obama demagoguery about rules-free GOP Darwinians is just one piece of this unflattering portrait.
In Arizona he said, "An economy built to last also means we've got to renew American values: fair play, shared responsibility." Wild applause. For those who think they have facts on their side, it will be maddening and enraging to watch other Obama audiences across the country cheer and applaud "An Economy Built to Last." Get used to it.
The GOP is appealing, as its candidates so often do, to the American brain. Barack Obama is happy to be left by himself, going for their hearts. If he wins, the Republican will wail at the unfairness, irrationality and illogic of what beat them.
Rick Santorum, in his Tuesday night also-ran speech to what looked like a roomful of about 35 people at a Nevada Days Inn, spoke of couples "sitting around a kitchen table" to figure out what comes next. Whatever his campaign's shortcomings, Mr. Santorum is the one man running who understands the Obama strategy to marginalize Republicans. At some point after the inevitable end of the nomination campaign, Mitt Romney should ask Rick Santorum to sit down with him to discuss the inner melodies of life in America these days. Barack Obama is the maestro of this music, and without it, you can't win a presidency.