These are my initial thoughts on the SOTU. I’ll write a more thorough, thought out post on this later, but these were my initial reactions during the speech.
- There was a lot of congress bashing going on. Good. This congress has been pathetic. It’s been too busy playing games to do a damn thing. And that has to stop. Kudos to the President for calling shenanigans. My favorite line, and probably one of the best I heard all night: “But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”
- And then we get to energy, and the President proposes… the very same policies that brought on this crisis in the first place. Doubling down on oil and gas is a fool’s errand. It’ll buy us time, certainly, but it will keep us complacent. We need real solutions, and we need them 10 years ago. This is not how we get there.
- Also on energy: the focus on wind and batteries was nice, but the elephant in the room is not electrical generation capacity, its liquid transportation fuel. Fuel for our cars. Until we deploy a nationally scaled fleet of electric vehicles and the nationwide infrastructure to match, electricity won’t help us drive around. And Americans love to drive.
- Piracy got a brief mention. The President didn’t support SOPA, but why was this in here? It made it sound like he did.
- Oh, and the spilled milk joke? Someone in the communications office better be in some serious trouble right now. That was just bad writing. And dumb.
- “When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich. It’s because they understand that when I get tax breaks I don’t need and the country can’t afford, it either adds to the deficit, or somebody else has to make up the difference – like a senior on a fixed income; or a student trying to get through school; or a family trying to make ends meet. That’s not right.” – FINALLY. An admission of the fact that tax cuts cost money, which has to come from somewhere. More of this please.
- And a little bit of truth. Its absurd that the President even had to say this: “The greatest blow to confidence in our economy last year didn’t come from events beyond our control. It came from a debate in Washington over whether the United States would pay its bills or not. Who benefited from that fiasco? “
- Seal Team 6 and the assassination of bin Laden as a metaphor for working together? Really? I understand what he was getting at, but that metaphor really didn’t sit right with me. We, as a nation, are not in a combat situation.
Overall, not a very good speech. This should have been the moment when the President explained his core philosophies. This should have been the moment when he defended his record, and called for frank and honest discussion. This was a time for big ideas and real solutions. We got very little of those tonight.
520 Chestnut 
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