The speech last night had the feel of a mini-State of the Union address, and not a good one at that. The president talked not only about Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Middle East peace, education, energy, jobs, competitiveness, manufacturing, and veterans policy. It is hard to effectively cover all those topics in an hour-long State of the Union address; it is virtually impossible to do so in a 18-minute address to the nation.
The pivot to the economy was not only awkward, but revealing. President Obama rarely talks about the war on terror. This is an abdication of one of his principal responsibilities as commander in chief—to explain our mission, lay out the stakes, and rally the country to victory. When he finally takes a moment to meet that responsibility and deliver a high-profile address on the war, he cannot resist the temptation to turn it into a speech about his domestic agenda.
The president said that addressing his domestic priorities “must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.” In fact, his “central responsibility as president” is to defend the country. And his failure to recognize this points to a central difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush saw that his highest responsibility was to prevent another attack on our country—by defeating the terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, and by defeating their hateful ideology by advancing the hopeful alternative of human freedom. President Obama does not see any of this as the central mission of his presidency. His central mission is to transform America—and the war on terror is a burden and a distraction from that mission.
As he put it:
Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve not done what’s necessary to shore up the foundations of our own prosperity. We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits. For too long, we have put off tough decisions on everything from our manufacturing base to our energy policy to education reform. As a result, too many middle-class families find themselves working harder for less, while our nation’s long-term competitiveness is put at risk.
A “trillion dollars at war”? That includes not only the cost of the battle in Iraq (which Obama opposed), but also the battle in Afghanistan, and our efforts to defeat the terrorists in Pakistan, the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and other fronts across the world (which Obama presumably supports). Yet he sees all this spending as money stolen from more important priorities here at home. To the contrary, it is an investment in those priorities. One trillion dollars over a decade to prevent another catastrophic attack on the American homeland is not short-changing our own people—it is funding the security that makes their prosperity possible.
It is telling that with the hundreds of hours Obama has spent speaking on healthcare, the stimulus, and his other domestic priorities, he could not dedicate a full 18 minutes to addressing the war on terror. That, as much as anything he said last night, sends a message across the world about this president’s priorities, determination, and resolve—and not an encouraging one at that.
Image by SEIU International.
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