Obama’s Last State Of The Union Plot A True Course for 2016
In last year’s State of the Union , Obama opened by telling the American people he wanted his speech to focus less on “a checklist of proposals and focus more on the values at stake in the choices before us.” This year he basically cut and pasted that line, starting off by promising Congress and viewers that he would “go easy on the traditional list of proposals for the year ahead.” Such laid back, colloquial language was dispersed throughout Barack “4th quarter” Obama’s speech. Just because his style was relaxed and informal doesn’t mean his speech was bereft of vision and substance. From the start, you could tell he felt compelled to set the direction for the progressive cause. He knows that big advances are coming. They are tantalizingly close to being within his legacy. While he may not be there for the culmination of many of these policies, Obama wanted this speech to be a touchstone for many of those accomplishments. Ever the man in control, and with the media spotlight slipping away from him, for now, he wants to be the compass for the next (hopefully) Democratic president. Let me be the first to admit, these speeches are notoriously tough to excel at (and often tough to watch). There’s so much to unpack, so many demographics to appeal to. As Zach Silk wrote to me during the speech, “every sentence has a constituency. And even with all that said some constituency is pissed they didn’t get mentioned.” Obama did some flexing in front of his colleagues, where he proceeded to essentially say “I told you so” to his doubters. He flaunted gas prices, talked about the recovery, and the robust jobs growth. He touted these successes for their due applause, but he didn’t dwell on them for long. He didn’t want to upset the economic
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