Reuters photos
In character with the “hope” that he dashed and the significant “change” that he never delivered, President Barack Obama last night delivered a falsely positive State of the Union address meant to capture the “swing vote” for his 2012 re-election campaign. The new slogan is “winning the future,” which is meant to make you keep on hoping for that promised change.
I watched President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address last night, live via whitehouse.gov (and I even followed along with his prepared remarks, which he followed to the word, with only a few minor exceptions), and my immediate reaction to the “SOTU” was that the Obamanesque slogans of “hope” and “change” — now that they’re defunct because we know that we were punk’d — apparently have been replaced with the equally fluffy but insubstantial “winning the future.”
(Oh, and Repugnican Rep. Joe “You Lie!” Wilson was able to contain himself this time.)
Seriously, though, Barack Obama is far more about saying the right thing, the most politically advantageous thing, than he is about doing the right thing. And the nation’s challenges are far more daunting than Obama let on in his address.
We’re soon to be awash in baby boomers who will be dependent upon us — that’s “dependent” as in “dependent upon Depends” — and we already don’t have the resources to handle the old people that we have now. And the profits-over-people Repugnicans want to undo any gains that might have been made with health-care reform (a.k.a. “Obamacare”).
We can talk all we want about this being our “Sputnik moment,” as Obama put it last night, but with an impending avalanche of dependent senior citizens who can only suck up our already vanishing resources, in the coming several years we’ll have far more sputum moments than “Sputnik moments.”
But hey, bravo to Barack for appealing to the “swing voters” with his new empty slogan of “winning the future” while he continues to alienate his base, those of us of the “professional left.”
Will the “swing voters” give Obama any money for his 2012 re-election campaign, though?
As far as I know, “swing voters” aren’t known for making substantial political donations.
And I’m one disgruntled former Obama supporter — a member of the “sanctimonious,” “professional left” — who won’t give Obama another penny or another vote. (I quite regret that I gave him hundreds of dollars and that in November 2008 I cast my vote for him.)
Former “President” George W. Bush is one motherfucking dipshit, but the one thing he never did was alienate his own base. Bush might have tried to play to the center sometimes, but he never abandoned those who brought him to the dance.
At any rate, I might write more about Obama’s speech of last night, but frankly, when the man moves his lips these days, all that I hear is the crafty rhetoric of promises that already are broken even as they are spoken.
I, for one, just can’t hear him anymore.
Robert's Virtual Soapbox 