http://spectator.org/articles/57543/steamroller-sotu
If you’re feeling a bit sick to your stomach, it’s probably not due to global warming or the flu. Tomorrow night Congress will hold its annual pep rally for President Obama’s agenda called the State of the Union address. It will be long, tedious, and over-filled with applause lines designed to get Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Chris Matthews to stand up and cheer. But it’s one of those rare Obama speeches that we need to listen to, not just hear. Because we are about to be steamrolled.
This year’s event will be worse than usual, almost certainly not featuring fun counterpoints such as Cong. Joe Wilson’s “you lie” shout or Justice Alito mouthing “not true” at Obama when he makes his rhetorical points. The only things we can be certain of won’t amuse, just abuse.
White House senior political adviser Dan Pfeiffer has set the stage for the speech in a three-page memo he reportedly wrote on why 2013 was such a disaster for Obama. Pfeiffer’s memo — which we’ll get to in a minute — tells us what we’ll hear tomorrow night, perhaps even some of the exact words. The other half of the speech will sound lot like the very long and very strange article about Obama by David Remnick in the New Yorker magazinelast week.
How much of Remnick’s piece is his sophomoric adulation of Obama and how much is Obama’s self-adulation is difficult to tell, but several things leap from its pages.