Most people watching the president’s State of the Union last night were probably thinking deep policy thoughts, remarking in sequence on President Obama’s failure to seriously address our exploding deficit and broken entitlement programs, the national repudiation of his healthcare law, the metastasizing regulatory burden on business and job creation, or to talk for barely more than five or six minutes on foreign policy before returning to a subject he’s clearly more comfortable with: gays in the military.
In fact, Obama’s failure to seriously address any of the important issues facing our country was the second most striking thing about the speech. The first most striking thing was the dramatic lack of applause.
The question that occupied my mind the first half-hour was, how long can he actually keep this thing going before he gets his first standing ovation? The answer was an incredible 17 minutes.
The MSM will try to attribute Obama’s applause deficit to the fact that Democrats and Republicans were sitting next to each other and probably felt shy expressing their partisanship. Sure.
When you actually have the duty of helping to craft these things, you learn that it’s not all that hard to write lines in such a way that both sides of the aisle have to get up and applaud, even if half do it very reluctantly. The hard part is keeping them in their seats for those moments when you want to bring the emotional register down and make a point that takes more than a couple of lines.
Instead, the first 30 minutes stretched on like some vast dead zone, while every once in a while some less than compelling phrase would cycle by like “winning the future,” or “this is our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
Sputnik? It’s possible that the speechwriter just felt defeated by his material. Imagine being handed a brand new policy initiative like Obama’s five-year budget freeze—at today’s insane levels of spending—and being expected to somehow dress up that turkey so it doesn’t squawk too loudly when you let it loose on the floor of the House chamber. Only Vice President Biden applauded for that one, and even he looked embarrassed.
One hears that Obama has been working on this since Thanksgiving, and while that’s the usual PR put out by White House Press Offices to demonstrate the president is really in charge and really involved, in this case it may just be true. The speech sounded like one in which the speechwriters had been sidelined and Obama let his true self come out. That’s the real Obama, the core Obama, the Obama beneath the Harvard leftie and radical community organizer—Obama the professor, the one who wants to bore all us students to tears with his stale and clichéd history lesson on America.
Joshua Gilder served as a senior speechwriter from 1985 to 1988. He co-authored two State of the Union addresses. He wrote President Reagan’s highly regarded 1988 address to students at Moscow State University. He is a senior director of the White House Writers Group.