Obama speech lacked Oomph

John Podhoretz:

Barack Obama doesn’t have his mojo back. Last night’s State of the Union was so pedestrian that even its most provocative sections — proposing new taxes and new witch hunts — had little rhetorical power or oomph. 

The candidate who suggested his victory in the Texas primary would be remembered as the moment at which the waters of the ocean would literally begin to recede has entirely lost his capacity to inspire — or to frighten his rivals — by his oratorical gifts alone. 

Without that force, and without much of a record to run on, he instead turned the classic State of the Union laundry list into his own personal Amazon.com gift registry. If Congress wants to be nice to him and to the American people, he said, it will send him various bills with lots of goodies in them, and when they arrive, all he’ll have to do is sign for them. 

Please. The president knows the horrifying reality of the mounting deficit and the unprecedented debt, and the nightmarish charts showing the public sector eating up the entirety of the national GDP over the next two decades. Even if he succeeds in ending the Bush tax cuts at the end of this year, the windfall to the Treasury will be eaten up instantly by existing demands. 

And yet, he proposed no fewer than six new federal projects in the first half-hour of the speech. You get the sense that even the liberal congressmen and senators standing and applauding have no real expectation that any of those proposals will ever, or could ever, become law. 

The president whose signature pieces of legislation will cost the Treasury more than $2 trillion — and who did not succeed in creating an explosion of economic growth — is in a terrible position to propose new spending plans. He already tried it last September in his “pass this bill now” speech, and that effort was stillborn.

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There is more.

Since my racing sailboat was named Oomph, Pohoretz point struck home.  Obama was in fantasy land with a wish list and not practical programs to get us out of debt and get the economy moving.   He is a man divorced from reality when it comes to economics.  His millionaire tax proposal is nonsense on stilts designed to appeal to the envy crowd.