So, who watched the State of the Union show this week? Did anyone really think that Snooki would actually lay off the booze?
Oops, my bad, that was “Jersey Shore.” It’s easy to get all these pop culture phenomena confused.
And confused is exactly what President Obama once again proved himself to be Tuesday night during his second State of the Union address. He ascended to the presidency in 2008 not with his policy stances but with his image. Not with his qualifications but with the brand name of Barack Obama. With charming charisma and vague notions of hope and change, he transformed himself into a pop culture icon who took the nation by storm.
However, the electorate lost its hope once it saw the change — change that ushered in a larger and increasingly intrusive government. This led to the massive defeat of the Democrats we witnessed in November.
On Tuesday night, we again caught a glimpse of the populist image that President Obama so successfully presented during his campaign. On the heels of November’s stinging results, he attempted to shift to the center in the perception of the American public. Although the speech had leftist agenda items liberally scattered throughout, Obama inserted key words and phrases that made him sound patriotic, open-minded and even conservative at times.
Apparently taking cues from his perception of the electorate’s concerns, he said that we need to eliminate the deficit. We need to secure our borders and enforce our laws. We need to strengthen our relationships with allies and get tough on terrorism. We need to cut the corporate tax rates and reform the tax code.
Yet among the populist rhetoric was one glaring omission. The issues he did tackle all were, to some extent, on the minds of the voters last fall; but the election as a whole was a referendum on big government. Intrusive, domineering, out-of-control, Big Brother government.
The American people do not want to be told what kinds of lightbulbs we can buy. We do not want to be told which cars we can or cannot drive. We do not want the Internet regulated, and we do not want to be patted down at airports.
President Obama did nothing to assure the American people that government was going to scale back on its intrusion and control in the lives of the average citizen. On the contrary, his speech was full of proposals to increase the size of government beyond the point to which he now has brought it.
His proposals to steer the free market with research incentives, control the prices within the medical field, introduce new “safeguards” to protect the American citizen, and regulate the insurance industry doomed his speech as an attempt to demonstrate a centrist (or even populist) mentality.
With this speech, President Obama has reinforced what we already knew — the Democratic Party is the party of big government. It is now up to the Republicans to help the Democrats maintain ownership of this agenda. Despite President Obama’s call for bipartisan support of his proposals, the electorate will remember, come next election, any Republican who was involved in efforts to increase government intrusion. Any notion to the contrary is about as realistic as what is depicted on “Jersey Shore.”
Bob Minchin is a fourth-year electrical engineering major. His column appears on Fridays.
