Regular folks like a laundry list

Regular folks like a laundry list

by digby

I was out last night and only got to see highlights of the State of the Union address and hear some of the analysis. From the commentary, many of the President's supporters seemed to be just a tad disappointed. They prefer the soaring oratory.

The instant polling suggests that the regular folk liked it just fine:


I have no idea how that stands up to the reactions to his earlier SOTUs and I'm not interested enough to check. But I do know that people tend to like State of the Union speeches generally and that the "laundry list" type like last night doesn't throw them the way it does the cognescenti. It turns out that they like it when the president lays out specifics, even if they are "small bore" as I kept hearing last night.

I did manage to catch the end of the speech with the tribute to the wounded soldier which was very moving. You cannot be human and fail to feel for that person's sacrifice. On the other hand, it's a little bit cheap for politicians to reap any reward for that sentiment, in my opinion.

Other than that, from what I can tell by reading it, the speech was a standard issue SOTU. I hope he follows through the proposals to use his executive power to help whatever discrete groups he can help. (A hundred thousand people here, a hundred thousand people there, pretty soon you're talking about real improvement...) He's coming up against the lame duck wall pretty soon and this is probably his only option. And the issues that really animate him, obviously, are in the foreign policy realm. In fact, it's always been his biggest ambition and if he hadn't been saddled with the financial crisis and its fallout, it's likely that would have been the focus of this presidency. If he gets a deal with Iran, it will certainly be a BFD, as Joe Biden would say.

All in all a fairly predictable second term so far. I'm just happy he didn't go on about the need to cut the deficit this time.

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