Some random, non-prioritized thoughts on my man Barry’s SOTU and the Mitch Daniels response:

(1) Before the SOTU began, my 14 year old daughter asked me which four issues I thought the Pres would hit on (this was not idle conversation — she was trying to get me to do her homework for her, which I realized as I saw her pencil poised over a work sheet and a disingenuous look of feigned neutral interest on her face as I began to speak). I told her my thoughts (instead of telling her to do her damn homework and think for herself, which is what I should have done) and one of them was NOT health care and, because she’s not an idiot, she asked why I thought the Pres wouldn’t talk about health care if it had been such an important issue in prior years. I didn’t have it really thought out at the time, but I think it’s because he’s being very cautious, especially with the five justices staring at him (and, man, I love her, but golly it looked like my girl Ruth was trying to pitch some sort of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ sequel — maybe, ‘Weekend at Ruthie’s'). No doubt there is a distinct possibiilty that the Supreme Court will strike down significant portions of the Affordable Health Care Act — the most likely being the mandate. I imagine BO’s going to play a “heads I win,” “tails you lose” game on that possibility. If the Supremes strike it down, he can run on a Roosevelt v. the out of touch/activist Court platform. If its get upheld…well, he’s a winner. Either way, he’s not touching that issue now until the Court rules.

(2) I pretty much hate SOTU’s laundry lists of “great ideas” — regardless of who the Pres is. If they were so great, why weren’t they proposed three years ago, or even last week. It’s almost as if SOTU addresses are when you bring your kid in for a talk about how they’ve been screwing up, and they try to preempt you with all the empty promises of stuff they’re gonna do that they haven’t done (and probably won’t do anyway), just to try to distract you into thinking that maybe the kid didn’t crash the car or whatever. The worst example of this was the suggestion of a new federal Task Force to investigate mortgage fraud in the housing industry. I don’t understand: (1) why or how this is necessary when there’s a DOJ investigation going on — and has been going on for three years (and has come up with nothing); or (2) why it took so long to focus on this. It so clearly smacks of make-work, nice sounding stuff that reeks of political disingenuity.

(3) That said, the suggestion that Obama is engaging in class warfare by suggesting a cranking up of the capital gains tax to wage levels (If that’s even what he’s suggesting, and I’m not sure) is silly — it’s no more class warfare than any other tax increase. Now, we can debate whether increasing capital gains taxes is more harmful than helpful — and I’m open to the argument either way, but to describe it as Marxism strikes me as hysterical and undermines what might be more persuasive arguments in favor of leaving the capital gains tax low, or even lowering it. No doubt that the timing of the Romney disclosures of his effective federal tax rate being 14% on kabillions of dollars of money was…problematic, and no doubt Obama is not an idiot and is running on a populist platform in an era of increased income inequality (as is, apparently, Newt). (As an aside, totally lame to bring Buffet’s secretary as a prop — only way that could have been cheesier and more obvious is if she was holding a head shot of Romney and glaring at him).

(4) All of my distaste for theatrics aside, most people recognize that Obama is not a madrasah-trained crazy-ass Marxist bent on destroying American exceptionalism, any more than Bush II was a deluded pawn of the Saudi Royal family, bent on cranking up Carlyle group profits at the expense of American lives and security. (Then again, maybe he is — although if he is, he did an awfully poor job of showing it last night — again). I don’t know about you, but I’m still feeling pretty darn exceptional. Maybe…with less equity in my house and a 401(k) that ought to cover some of my burial costs — not all, mind you, but some. So…I’m feeling a little equity and retirement fund light in the exceptional loafers. Which leads me to…

(4) Mitch Daniels. I had not seen him speak at length before and was generally very impressed, but I thought his speech was more of a direct slap at Romney than at BO. He started off by saying Job 2 (not Job 1 — but still up there) was to preserve and maintain the safety net for most Americans, and he made what I thought was a pretty strong argument that there should be some form of means testing for recipients of SS and Medicare. All of which sounded to me like — BO’s point that the wealthy ought to pay a bit more in taxes, and maybe guys like Romney have been living large off the ol’ government when they don’t need or deserve it. I did NOT take from that contention that Daniels wanted to break into my home, liquidate my assets and hand them over to the state — yet. I was, however, absolutely impressed with his demeanor, his timber and his points. Plus, like all the people who have do to these kinds of responses, he was forced to operate at a big disadvantage — no multiple camera shots of him on high speaking to the assembled hushed masses, no audience of partisan Congressional whack-a-moles popping up and down to cheer every other bromide, no Charlie McCarthy-like V.P. in the background there to hang on every word and nod sagely as if the Pres were delivering the Sermon on the Mount (omigosh, you think the military is great! what a thoughtful and persuasive point — I’m going to nod and cheer now); not even an uncomfortable-looking guy from the opposition party there to try to look as respectfully disdainful of everything he said from beginning to end. Just Mitch and one camera and thank you, lord, a not-totally-MGM Grand-like sound stage to make his points. I liked what Daniels said and how he said it. (After doing a little research on him, I was also interested in this factoid — maybe you guys knew this — but as a college student at Princeton, he was active in BOTH the College Republicans AND the anti-war movement).

(4) Finally, I thought Obama’s call to bipartisanship — as he does every now and then — resonated well. The problem is, of course, that there are huge fundamental differences in how each party views the role of government (at our best, progressives and liberals have faith in the abiilty of government to do great and productive things on behalf of people who did indeed need a collective (ack — I said it — it’s not code, though) response to a problem — at your best, conservatives have faith in the ability of the individual to do great and productive things when unencumbered by government). I wish we could figure out more often than we have how to respect and recognize the good faith each of us has in those goals — that the goals are both worth striving toward — and that neither of us should be demonized by the other for striving after them. Sometimes that means we are at complete loggerheads on public policy questions — so be it, that’s what elections are for — let’s make our arguments are strongly and forcefully and persuasively as we can and then respect when the country chooses one or the other. Part of the problem is that the liberal’s view of the Republican Party right now is that we fear that the Republicans would rather obstruct legislation that it knows or suspects will help people live better, fairer, lives in the name of seizing back power from an Executive Branch that they don’t like. I also know that some conservatives feared during the Iraq War that Democrats would rather we lost the war and looked bad doing so in order to seize back the White House from the Republican Party. Regardless of whether those perceptions are true or not (and I prefer to think they are both completely untrue), we need to avoid putting ourselves in places where they can seem plausible. We do that by reaffirming our commonality as Americans, which leads me finally to…

(5) My favorite conservative of the night — Jeff Lake, Congressman from Arizona, who sat next to Gabby Giffords and helped her to her feet whenever she wanted to stand to applaud something of BO’s speech she believed in (and with which he did not necessarily agree). I saw him interviewed after the speech and his emotion and sincerity and happiness in helping his colleague — even at the risk of perhaps alienating a casual viewer who might have mistook his standing as support — that represented to me the best of our leaders. I wish we could all act that way, more of the time, in pursuit of our respective, strongly-held beliefs.

Thanks for reading — if you did — and I’ll appreciate any thoughts, and I hope I did not run afoul of any rules of the board in posting this. If I did, my sincere apologies.

Enjoyed reading that. And yeah, I can’t remember anything Obama said in his last SOTU other than the thing about excluding illegal immigrants from the health care bill that Joe Wilson screamed about being a lie (or was that the year before?) and the shout out to Alito re: Citizen’s United (which got two heads of Supreme Court justices nodding and two heads shaking, as I recall). And really, that was just drama and not policy, so your point is well taken.

However, I don’t think it’s the fault of his (probably twenty five year old) speech writer(s), because generally I always come away thinking — wow, nice speech. I just think that’s the nature of the beast. It’s been true about everybody’s SOTU addresses –even Clinton’s (which I agree, were better). I tend to think they all suffer from what you describe — the list of soon-to-be-abandoned policy directives, pie-in-sky nothingness or utterly hyperbolized little executive orders which impact maybe a couple people down the street working on milk spillage issues. Seems to be par for the course since I’ve been old enough to watch these things (don’t ask).

And I appreciate your point about Clinton which is that he could — in his charming way — take on Republicans directly and still get some policy stuff going. I don’t know why that is. Are the policy goals so much more divisive or ambitious? Does Obama command less respect? Has the Republican party become more obstreperous? I don’t know, which is ironic because I see Obama as far more willing to accomodate than either Clinton or Bush on policy issues, and yet he is constantly attacked as the “most partisan President in history” in the media. (There’s a commonality between conservatives and liberals — we each think the media is out to get us).

As for debt relief, darn straight everyone should be worried about it, for the reasons you articulate so well. To what degree though, we would probably disagree. Moreover, it seems to me that there’s got to be some give and take and less ideological purity on that issue — if debt relief is really the be-all/end-all goal as some conservatives cast it, then why not support the Affordable Health Care Act. It reduces the debt by decreasing health care costs over the long term. Yes, I understand the principled objection to the individual mandate — that it constitutes an unprincipled and unconstitutional intrusion into the lives of indidivuals by the federal government. OK. But putting aside my own view of the Constitution as allowing that kind of regulation and putting aside my view that it’s no more horribly immoral than requiring us to carry auto insurance (which I’m willing to do without resort to armed revolution no matter how crappy my insurance premiums are because I recognize the overall benefits of everyone at least supposedly getting auto insurance) — but putting aside that — and putting aside all the other benefits of the relatively modest provisions that most people seem to want — isn’t it just a good idea from a debt relief standpoint. Two other points — Bush tax cuts and foreign wars. Big contributors to the deficit over the last ten years. Why aren’t the deficit warriors with us on those?

Entitlement reform — needs to be the subject of discussion — which is what I liked about Daniels’ response. I posed this question above and it’s more than rhetorical, “Why do conservatives ignore the danger of demonstrable global warming and refuse to take seriously efforts to deal with it now and why do liberals ignore the danger of demonstrable flaying of the safety net in SS/Medicare and refuse to take seriously efforts to deal with it now?

I dunno. But more talk about that stuff, less talk (please!) about Newt’s sex life (if I have to imagine an open marriage with Newt, Calista, Hillary and Bill one more time, I’m gonna have to kill myself).