Obama’s State of the Union Speech – The Omissions Say a Lot

by Jack

Obama’s SOU: Sometimes what a politician doesn’t want to talk about is more important than what he does. Last night Pres. Obama either omitted or barely touched on government reform and cost containment. Hey, wasn’t that a key plank in his election bid? Now it’s not even brought up?

It seems like new Islamic rebel factions in Syria are springing up every day, and the Muslim radicals are stepping up to do battle again in Libya and Yemen. Our foreign policy has failed and our force projection (bombing) has failed. Al Qaeda and ISIS are gaining traction the Arab Peninsula. This was skipped over in favor of focusing only a few minor achievements in this hemisphere because it makes the White House look better. But, that’s not our real world view. Obama talks about making progress in the fight against ISIS, yet they have no trouble recruiting and now they control more territory in Syria than before our bombing campaign and he once quipped Al Qaeda was all but done, but that’s just not even remotely true.

Entitlement [reform] didn’t come up. No rush to fix this despite our huge deficit. In 2013 Obama was talking about enacting Simpson-Bowles commission suggestions to Medicare, but that never happened. 2013: “Those of us who care deeply about programs like Medicare must embrace the need for modest reforms — otherwise, our retirement programs will crowd out the investments we need for our children and jeopardize the promise of a secure retirement for future generations.” Today… its not even mentioned.

Also a left out was any mention of extreme gun violence and high homicide rate within the African-American communities across the US. Like the traffic cop says, nothing to see, keep moving…move along.

The core of Obama’s speech was a call for a new theory of “middle class economics.” This received seven references, but not much was said about the growing class of poor in America thanks to his economic policies. The words [poverty] and [poor] didn’t seem to be in his vocabulary last night.

Obama barely paid lip-service to eradicating extreme poverty around the globe, but he didn’t talk the poor in the U.S. He did ask to raise the minimum wage: “If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it. If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise,” he said. Most people I know would rather reward people for working, than giving them entitlements, but raising the minimum wage is not the best way to do it.

Not a word about brokering a peace deal for the Israeli-Palestinian situation. In the past two SOU speeches he talked a great deal about this, but it seems like he’s given up on them in 2015.

Regarding Iran, he didn’t have much to say, except that Congress shouldn’t pass sanctions legislation that he says will derail talks with Iran over its nuclear program. That sort of appeasement policy has been a total flop and Iran has only ramped up their nuclear program.

He didn’t talk about why the White House has tried to remove the word Muslim from linkage to terrorism. However, he did say, “We continue to reject offensive stereotypes of Muslims, the vast majority of whom share our commitment to peace.”