He can read a nice speech but he has no accomplishments. He has no new ideas. He strikes me as a con man.
Obama Speech React: 1) A little flat, and not just because of it’s now-required State-of-the Union laundry-list passages; 2) Background off, color-wise; 3) Best graf by far:
I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.
MLK grafs also good. But not enough like thiose; 4) Gave voters little sense that he understands and can master the pressures–bureaucratic imperatives, unions, civil service rules– that have often caused previous idealistic liberal presidents to fall short while sucking up taxpayer dollars. The only sentence addressing this concern (that I heard) was;
I will also go through the federal budget, line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less – because we cannot meet twenty-first century challenges with a twentieth century bureaucracy.
Actually, this sentence suggests he doesn’t understand the problem. "Twentieth century bureaucracy" wasn’t very effective at meeting twentieth century challenges; 5) The one carefully non-controversial mention of immigration was met with … silence; 6) In general, Obama went all euphemistic and vague when discussing controversial domestic topics. On education, for example, he wants "higher standards and more accountability." What you mean "accountability"? Nothing here with the bite of his 2004 putdown of "the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." The implied message about Obama’s character is that he’s a bit of a wimp, at least in public. Or at least he chose to be a bit of a wimp on an occasion when he didn’t have to; 7) Why the slow, angsty movie-music at the end? I thought someone in the Politburo had died. 8) Some of the professionals’ doubts about the move to an outdoor setting were validated. The confetti immediately blew to one side of the stage and got tangled in the exploding Barackopolis, where it looked like a Halloween spider’s web. Symbol of overreach! 9) Didn’t you want to see Obama, more than previous nominees, "validated" by being surrounded by other more familiar Dems in the traditional group greet-and-hug scene (in which they implicitly both approve him and show that he will have support)?** Instead, he asks us to buy him as the unknown loner savior, striding on and off the stage with just his family and running mate. It’s a tougher sale, and an unnecessary one I think.
Peggy Noonan notes the lack of "humor, and wit, and even something approximating joy." … Michael Goodwin saw a mismatch between the speech and the stage. And the speech might have seemed better if the setting hadn’t raised expectations of a monumental performance. …
