So I guess I’m a little late to the party, since the 2015 SOTU is SOOOO last week, but I feel like I need to respond to William Rivers Pitt, who wrote:
It was a fine show on Tuesday night, a masterful performance, and a comprehensive waste of time. Leaving aside everything I’ve said, there is the stone-cold fact that absolutely none of the progressive ideas President Obama proposed on Tuesday night have the vaguest chance of seeing daylight in this new GOP-dominated congress…which begs the question:
Why did he wait until now – when everything he proposed was demonstrably doomed before the words even passed his teeth – to uncork the kind of rhetoric so many of his voters have been waiting for? Was it to poke a stick in the eye of this new assemblage? Perhaps to lay some rhetorical groundwork for the 2016 presidential race?
Or did he never mean any of it in the first place, and said it on Tuesday night secure in the fact that none of it would ever come to pass?
One of the reasons I stopped writing about politics for so long was because I finally hit a wall where I could no longer deal with the cynics and my own growing cynicism about everything. And although I have in the past enjoyed some of Pitt’s work, this is a classic example of the “It’s Never Good Enough” syndrome that has affected many of my fellow left wingers. But just to remind you -and Mr. Pitt- what the last Democratic president’s response to an electoral trouncing was:
It might seem like a small thing, but this is not what Clinton did when faced with a similarly hostile Congress in the last two years of his crippled presidency. Here’s what Clinton did. He signed the:
Balanced Budget Act of 1997
Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997
Iraq Liberation Act
Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act
Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act
Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000You might want to familiarize yourself with this list of legislation because it all combined to set the stage for the war in Iraq and the Great Recession. That’s what being “serious” about working with a Republican Congress looked like, and history doesn’t look kindly on the results.
So, I’m pretty grateful that our president has no intention of going out and giving a State of the Union address where he will explain how he is going to meet John Boehner and Mitch McConnell halfway.
So, I have to ask: if Mr. Pitt was so dissatisfied with the speech the president delivered -one which made the Republicans look like assholes, showed them refusing to clap for an economy that actually IS strengthening despite Pitt’s suggestion to the contrary, indicating that he’d veto keystone XL- why does he offer no compelling alternative in his rejoinder? All I see here is a bunch of pissing and moaning: Pitt offers nothing. His comments on “turning the page” seem to suggest he’d prefer that Obama deliver doom-and-gloom to the electorate: how would THAT impact Democratic chances moving forward in 2016? Regardless of the need to curb emissions, cheaper gasoline is good for the average family’s bottom line: is the President not to point out this salient fact? Then there’s the fact that Obama talked down the Keystone XL pipeline, which he has promised to veto: Pitt either missed that or misinterpreted the President’s remarks. Pitt also skipped this, which seems more than a little disingenuous on his part:
We believed we could reduce our dependence on foreign oil and protect our planet. And today, America is number one in oil and gas. America is number one in wind power. Every three weeks, we bring online as much solar power as we did in all of 2008. And thanks to lower gas prices and higher fuel standards, the typical family this year should save $750 at the pump.
Guess that part about solar and wind didn’t fit the pre-determined narrative?
Pitt doesn’t tell us what he would have done differently as President, only that he objected to what Obama said. Pitt also objected to Obama’s statements about why America thrived in the 20th century, and then proceeds to blame Obama for policies the President had no hand in passing -see the preceding list of Clinton’s sins- for driving the country into the ditch. Pitt also fails to include what followed: a proposal for free community college and work that is already underway to update the country’s job-training system. Why, it’s almost as if Pitt is DELIBERATELY ignoring much of the speech’s substance so he has something to complain about.
But the fact remains: if you’re going to take the time to pen a screed about all that was wrong with the President’s address, you should at the very least be able to articulate “Here is what I would have said and done.” Pitt doesn’t even try, and in that regard is no better than the President’s detractors on the right.
