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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.
First is the recitation of Obama’s “accomplishments,” including “…the economic rescue, the forty-four months of job growth, a reduction in carbon emissions, a spike in clean-energy technology…” But those exist only in Obama’s and Remnick’s minds. The “economic rescue” didn’t fix what was ailing with the economy. The economy — in terms of growth, jobs, and prosperity — is in far worse shape than it was five years ago. There haven’t been forty-four months of job growth: there’s been more than forty-four months of people leaving the work force and deflating the unemployment figures artificially. There are about 92 million potentially-working Americans without jobs, the lowest rate of job market participation in 35 years.
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