SOTU: Déjà vu all over again
THE DAILY BLADE: Listening to what she fervently hopes is the last State of the Union address by President Barack Hussein Obama, The Stiletto was reminded that there is a reason familiarity breeds contempt. This SOTU was recycled from salvaged material; no new ideas were used in the making of this speech.
According to The Washington Post, “[t]he swagger which Obama rode into office with was back in his address.” And so Obama reprised his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004 (“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America.”) when he said, “What’s at stake are not Democratic values or Republican values, but American values.”
But it’s not the first time Obama has repeated this particular flourish. As The New Yorker’s John Cassidy points out, when Obama said he wanted to “reclaim” these “American values,” the verbiage was “was pretty much a straight lift” from a speech he delivered in Osawatomie, KS, last month (“Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1% values or 99% values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”).
Ditto the part about wanting an economy where “everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules” – except that this time around Obama ditched the Occupy Wall Street lingo, seeing as how members of the group lobbed a smoke bomb over the White House fence last week to protest his crony capitalism and a man linked to the group shot up the joint in what federal prosecutors describe as an assassination attempt.
Similarly, The Associated Press points out that when he called for an end to oil company subsidies it was “at least Obama's third run at stripping subsidies from the oil industry”:
Back when fellow Democrats formed the House and Senate majorities, he sought $36.5 billion in tax increases on oil and gas companies over the next decade, but Congress largely ignored the request. He called again to end such tax breaks in last year's State of the Union speech. And he's now doing it again, despite facing a wall of opposition from Republicans who want to spur domestic oil and gas production and oppose tax increases generally.
Obama’s justification for the so-called “Buffett rule” that anyone who earns $1 million a year – from any source, including interest and investment income – should pay 30 percent or more in taxes (“[Y]ou can call this class warfare all you want. … Most Americans would call that common sense”) also had a familiar ring. It was an iteration of a line in a deficit reduction speech Obama gave last September (“This is not class warfare. It's math.”).
The Republican National Committee also pulled together these rhetorical retreads (video link):
2010: "It's time for colleges and universities to get serious about cutting their own costs.
2012: "Colleges and universities have to do their part by working to keep costs down."
2010: "And we should continue the work by fixing our broken immigration system."
2011: "I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration."
2012: "I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration."
2010: "We face a deficit of trust."
2012: "I've talked tonight about the deficit of trust . . ."
2010: "We can't wage a perpetual campaign."
2012: "We need to end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign."
When Obama wasn’t repeating himself, he was contradicting himself:
† Obama first said, “As long as I’m President, I will work with anyone in this chamber,” but towards the end of his speech he threatened to act “[w]ith or without this Congress.”
† About his job creation record he said “[W]e lost four million before our policies were in full effect. … In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs.” The WaPo did the math:
[I]it took a full nine months to run up 4 million in job losses, some eight months after the stimulus was passed into law … Trying to change the focus from his overall job-creation record, the president focuses on private-sector jobs created since the recession ended.
So let’s see … 4 million jobs lost + 3 million jobs created = a deficit of 1 million jobs since Obama took office.
† In one breath, Obama claimed his administration is “making it easier for American businesses to sell products all over the world,” and in the next breath he announced the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that “will be charged with investigating unfair trade practices in countries like China” – the opening salvo in a global trade war with the world’s second largest economy.
† After promising to support “the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country … every risk-taker and entrepreneur who aspires to become the next Steve Jobs,” Obama wants to “return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility” by vilifying people who risked their savings to invest in fledgling companies that become the next Apple, as well as those who inherited stock in such companies as heirs to the founders (“because of loopholes and shelters in the tax code, a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households).”
† Oh, and Obama first claimed that “Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary” and a few minutes later said that it’s common sense to ask “a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes.” Obama clearly doesn’t know the difference between the rate of tax a person pays and the amount. Leaving aside the fact that Buffett’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, is so well compensated that she is in the top 1 percent of income earners in the U.S., she couldn’t possibly pay as much as her boss does in taxes. Even at the lower tax rate he pays on his investment income (17.4 percent to her 35.8 percent), Buffett paid nearly $7 million to the I.R.S. last year, which is 14 years of income for Bosanek.
† Finally, Obama proposed that “the money we’re no longer spending at war” should be used to “pay down our debt” and “do some nation-building right here at home” – by which he means “clean energy tax credits”; “[h]elp manufacturers eliminate energy waste in their factories and give businesses incentives to upgrade their buildings”; and “repair America’s infrastructure ... crumbling roads and bridges, [the] power grid, [a] high-speed broadband network.” As The WaPo explains:
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were funded with borrowed money, so what Obama is really asking for is an increase in domestic spending relative to the Pentagon. The United States is still running huge deficits, so none of this imagined savings would “pay down the debt” until the United States once again began running surpluses. Instead, his proposal would continue to add to the debt.
And when Obama wasn’t busy repeating or contradicting himself, he was making all sorts of factual errors.
For instance, just as Obama has deliberately misquoted the bible to suit his purposes, he inverted Abraham Lincoln’s thoughts on the role of government. Obama claimed Lincoln said: “Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” What Lincoln actually said is: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.”
That’s not a justification for an overweening Federal government, but an explanation of the limits of Federalism. On the other hand, it only took four years, but Obama finally got the number of states in the union right (“Each time I look at that flag, I’m reminded that our destiny is stitched together like those fifty stars and those thirteen stripes.”).
Yes, it’s been a steep learning curve.
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