He Who No Longer Walks on Water

At this stage in our nation’s decline, does anyone still care what Barack Obama thinks or says about “the state of the union”? I think not. More than 52 million people watched Obama’s first State of the Union in 2009. It has been all downhill ever since –– with 48 million viewers in 2010, 43 million in 2011, and just 38 million last year. That’s a decline of 28 percent in four years. The president will almost certainly lay an even bigger egg this year than he did last year. If the New York Times is correct in the preview offered in Sunday’s paper, this year’s SOTU will be almost the same as last year’s –– only longer, duller, and even more divorced from reality. The Times reported:

President Obama on Tuesday will move beyond of the politics of the moment to define a second-term agenda built around restoring economic prosperity to the middle class, using his State of the Union to unveil initiatives in education, infrastructure, clean energy and manufacturing. … [He] will insist that only “a thriving middle class” can stimulate long-term growth and that Americans must be given the tools to succeed. … His call for new government investments… is an effort to shift the emphasis away from reducing the deficit and will serve in part as an answer to Republican criticism that he has not focused enough on jobs. 

So Obama is still looking for the government to act not just as nanny, but also as the great engine of growth! And to hell with the deficit! What a surprise that will be to most viewers –– assuming there are any apart from the pundits, who are paid to pretend that anything that the president says is news. Neither he nor his friends at the New York Times seem to have noticed how the Middle Class –– as the supposed beneficiary of the “new government investments” –– has floundered as a result of all the generous “investments” that the government made over the past four years. In its lead editorial on August 27 of last year (“Negative $4,019: The Obama Years have ...