It’s the Barack Obama Station, “very scary.”
Sponsored by ForAmerica.org.
Cato experts Gene Healy, Ben Friedman, Michael F. Cannon, Dan Mitchell, Sallie James, John Samples, Justin Logan, Jagadeesh Gokhale, Neal McCluskey, and David Rittgers deconstruct the president’s speech and correct some of his errors—including the “American family” metaphor, calls for more federal education spending, zero-sum thinking in trade and globalization policy, ObamaCare fixes, TSA pat down jokes, soaking the rich, and much more. I’d like to encourage you to share these incisive analyses with your friends, colleagues, and readers.
For more, here is CATO’s blog coverage of the SOTU speech.
-By Warner Todd Huston
I sat through President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address last night. During the event I live Tweeted the whole thing (You can read that all at http://twitter.com/#!/warnerthuston) and ended up with an empty feeling and a headache. Obama’s address was long on calls for spending, filled with bromides, and weighted with jaw, jaw but pretty short on substance. In fact, it seemed like his 12 new spending ideas and his patriotic vagaries was simply his first step onto the 2012 campaign trail as opposed to a serious address to the nation.
Obama fittingly began his address citing John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, and memorializing the wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. He then said that we had a “robust” debate in our politics and averred that it was one thing for the parties to sit together that night but it depended on what they all do “tomorrow” and he used that point to plead for moving forward with more bi-partisanship.
Tellingly, even as Obama has paid lip service to bipartisanship for three years, when he became president neither he nor his party made any moves to implement any bipartisanship. In fact, when Democrat Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House she never met with any Republicans on anything. This whole claim or bipartisanship is simply a farce on Obama’s part and Obama continued that farce in the SOTU speech.
Continue reading “
Jaw, Jaw and Bromides: Obama’s State of His Next Campaign for President Address”