By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, January 14, 2016
President Obama’s Tuesday-night address to Congress was
less about the state of the union than about the state of the presidency. And
the state of this presidency is spent.
The signs of intellectual exhaustion were everywhere.
Consider just three. After taking credit for success in Syria, raising American
stature abroad, and prevailing against the Islamic State — one claim more
surreal than the next — Obama was forced to repair to his most well-worn
talking point: “If you doubt America’s commitment — or mine — to see that
justice is done, just ask Osama bin Laden.”
Really? Five years later, that’s all you’ve got?
Indeed, it is. What else can Obama say? Talk about
Crimea? Cite Yemen, Libya, Iraq, the South China Sea, the return of the
Taliban?
“Surveys show our standing around the world is higher
than when I was elected to this office,” Obama boasted. Surveys, mind you. As
if superpower influence is a Miss Universe contest. As if the world doesn’t see
our allies adrift, our enemies on the march. and our sailors kneeling, hands
behind their heads, in front of armed Iranians, then forced to apologize on
camera. (And our secretary of state expressing appreciation to Iran after their
subsequent release.)
On the domestic side, Obama’s agenda was fairly short, in
keeping with his lame-duck status. It was still startling when he worked up a
passion for a great “new moonshot”: curing cancer.
Is there a more hackneyed national-greatness cliché than
the idea that “If we can walk on the moon . . . ”? Or a more hackneyed
facsimile of vision than being “the nation that cures cancer”? Do Obama’s
speechwriters not know that it was Richard Nixon who first declared a war on
cancer — in 1971?
But to see just how bare is the cupboard of ideas of the
nation’s most vaunted liberal visionary, we had to wait for the stunning
anachronism that was the speech finale. It was designed for inspiration and
uplift. And for some liberal observers, it actually worked. They were thrilled
by the soaring tones as Obama called for, yes, a new politics — a post-partisan
spirit of mutual understanding, rational discourse, and respect for one’s
opponents.
Why, it was hope and change all over again. You’d have
thought we were back in 2008 with Obama’s moving, stirring promise of a new and
higher politics that had young people swooning in the aisles and a TV anchor
thrilling up the leg — and gave Obama the White House.
Or even further back to 2004, when Obama electrified the
nation with his Democratic-convention speech: “There’s not a black America and
white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States
of America.”
Tuesday night, Obama did an undisguised, almost
phrase-for-phrase reprise of that old promise. Earnestly, he urged us to “see
ourselves not, first and foremost, as black or white, or Asian or Latino, not
as gay or straight, immigrant or native born, not as Democrats or Republicans,
but as Americans first.”
On cue, various commentators were moved by this sermon
summoning our better angels. Good grief. I can understand falling for this
twelve years ago. But now? A cheap self-quotation, a rhetorical mulligan, from
a man who had two presidential terms to act on that transformative vision and
instead gave us the most divisive, partisan, tendentious presidency since
Nixon.
Rational discourse and respect for one’s opponents? This
is a man who campaigned up and down the country throughout 2011 and 2012 saying
that he cares about posterity, Republicans only about power.
The man who accused opponents of his Iran treaty of
“making common cause” with Iranians “chanting death to America.”
The man who, after Paul Ryan proposed a courageous,
controversial entitlement reform, gave a presidential address — with Ryan,
invited by the White House, seated in the first row — calling his ideas
un-American.
In a final touch of irony, Obama included in his wistful
rediscovery of a more elevated politics an expression of reverence for, of all
things, how “our founders distributed power between . . . branches of
government.” This after years of repeatedly usurping Congress’s legislative
power with unilateral executive orders and regulations on everything from
criminal justice to climate change to immigration (already halted by the
courts).
There is wisdom to the 22nd Amendment. After two terms,
presidents are spent. Nothing shows it like a State of the Union valedictory
repeating the hollow promises of the yesteryear candidate — as if the
intervening presidency had never occurred.
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