http://nypost.com/2016/01/13/obama-delivers-the-most-boring-speech-of-his-presidency/Obama delivers the most boring speech of his presidency
By John Podhoretz
January 13, 2016 | 3:39am
Look, if Barack Obama didn’t consider Barack Obama’s presidency a success, who would? Of course his last State of the Union was filled with happy talk about the current condition of the United States and its limitless future. He has a year left to convince America and his posterity that his tenure has not been a failure.
He’s got his work cut out for him. According to Gallup, a mere 23 percent of the American people are satisfied with the direction of the United States. But since it’s unlikely the president is going to get any part of his domestic agenda through Congress — and since he really doesn’t want to do much of anything abroad — he might as well take a shot at it.
But not that shot.
In what was arguably the most boring major speech of his presidency, Obama didn’t even attempt to make a consistent argument or prove the case he was making for his presidency and the glorious moment to which he has brought this country.
He began by saying he was going to keep this one short, but, in fact, it ran more than an hour — and don’t think that was due to the thunderous applause continually interrupting him. There was no thunderous applause. The text and the sound bites were so dull, even the efforts by his fellow Democrats to provide a positive soundtrack seemed forced and halfhearted.
His fundamental argument Tuesday night was that he’s saved the economy — indeed, he’s done such a bang-up job that he implicitly took credit for the fact that gas is now at $2 a gallon.
Though maybe he does deserve credit, since the Saudis are furiously pumping out oil to make sure Obama’s new buddy Iran can’t make too much money from it as it makes its way to a nuclear weapon down the road.
Oh, and speaking of Iran, the president said nothing about the fact that 10 American sailors were arrested earlier in the day for the crime of being in a boat. Obama would permit no muddying of the waters in his portrait of an America so on the right track, only a bad person might think otherwise. (No mention of San Bernardino either, by the way.)
People who say the economy is worse than it was when he took office, he charged, “are peddling fiction.” And, of course, it’s true that the economy is larger than it was in 2009.
But median wages are lower than they were when he took office, and it’s not a fiction that people know it and don’t like being told they’re somehow wrong for feeling as though something has gone very wrong.
This is not exclusively his doing — median wages have been stagnating for 15 years.
But health insurance costs that have risen due to ObamaCare, and which have contributed mightily to the pocketbook squeeze, sure are his doing.
Bizarrely, the president then pooh-poohed the threat from ISIS and terrorists around the world by assuring Americans we would wipe them out — and that to think otherwise was somehow dangerous because it empowered the bad guys.
He spent more time and showed more passion lecturing Americans about their conduct toward Muslims. He’s right that behaving badly toward Muslims, or committing a crime at a mosque, is a terrible thing.
But saying that “when a kid is called names . . . we are diminished in the eyes of the world” is a kind of schoolmarmish bushwah that should force even the most sentimental person to have to restrain himself from throwing his remote through his TV.
Except that his eyes had long since glazed over from the tedium.
Oh, and the president gave Joe Biden the job of curing cancer. In 12 months. Good luck with that, Joe!
