I caught about 25 minutes or so of President Obama’s State of the Union address on 630AM/99.7FM WPRO on my way home last night, which served to make me even more relieved to pull into the driveway. Put aside all the cortex-numbing spin, the take away message from what I heard, and what I’ve read since, is that Obama still doesn’t get the message that the people of the United States are sending him.
Americans don’t want to hear “our country” and think first of all of its government. We don’t want to hear what government is going to do for us; we want to hear what the government is going to stop preventing us from doing. In other words, the subtext of the President’s message is that he’ll lead the government in coming up with a plan to assist we little folk who are wandering clueless in a complicated reality. And surely I’m not the only person in the global audience who noticed that every time he spoke of “hard-working Americans,” he went through a list of union — especially public-sector union — roles before grudgingly mentioning such afterthoughts as “people who start businesses.”
On top of it all, the brilliant orator’s style long ago began to grate. Listening on the radio, I could picture him doing his teleprompter-left, teleprompter-right head oscillation. “Word word [pause] word word word word [pause] word.”