The Daily Background
| SOTU: Final Thoughts
by Arlen Parsa
Bush’s speech this year was, in my mind, just plain boring. He didn’t offer much new in the way of brave new policies (expanding private schooling was probably the biggest item), and his rhetoric didn’t have any new edge that we haven’t heard before either. I think we all know that very little Bush said he wants will get done that isn’t already in the pipeline (i.e. the economy fix and perhaps the FISA “compromise”), and his speech just came off as… irrelevant.
On the flip side, Kathleen Sebelius’ Democratic reaction was pretty boring as well, for that matter. To be fair, opposition party SOTU responses are always extremely tough to give and are usually rather dull in comparison to the SOTU (they’ve got no loud audience, no reaction shots, no expansive set), but tp me, Sebelius just seemed a bit quiet, at least in comparison to 2007’s stirring Democratic Response by Jim Webb.
Sebelius, by the way, is reportedly going to endorse Obama in her home state of Kansas on Tuesday. The two will do at least one event in the February 5th state. The state has 32 pledged delegates and 8 superdelegates.
What struck me about this year’s SotU is the shocking gap between the priorities of the White House and the priorities of the American populace. To say that the president is out of touch is to understate; he seems to be ordering from a different menu, watching a different cable system, surfing a whole parallel internet.
I won’t take up more space here, but I offer a “grade” of the speech on this week’s Weekly Rader post:
http://weeklyrader.blogspot.com/2008/01/grading-state-of-union.html