What a different speech this could have been. And it’s only luck that allowed President Obama’s first State of the Union (although it’s his third speech to a joint session of Congress) to be as boring as it was.
The presentation opened with a series of banalities. “When the Union was turned back at Bull Run, and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt,” Obama intoned. “When the market crashed on Black Tuesday, and civil rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain.”
Indeed it was. A pity we cannot say the same thing. America’s future is clear: Unless we start cutting spending and take control of entitlement programs, our children will go broke making good on our promises.
As things stand, just three entitlements, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, could amount for the entire federal budget in a few decades. Lawmakers would have to eliminate spending on everything else -- including defense -- or else raise taxes by more than $10,000 per household per year.
Obama could have announced a plan to rein in these entitlements. That would have been a mission worthy of his boilerplate. Instead, he meandered for more than 70 minutes, ending up with a speech that seemed to be mostly about himself. “According to one count, Obama used the words “my” or “mine” 18 times and “I” 88 times, better than once a minute,” reported Andrew Malcolm in the Los Angeles Times.
But let’s face it: the fact that the speech was boring was a positive sign. Obama was more than an hour into it before he mentioned that, “We’ve made substantial investments in our homeland security and disrupted plots that threatened to take American lives. We are filling unacceptable gaps revealed by the failed Christmas attack, with better airline security and swifter action on our intelligence.”
And that may be true, as far as it goes. But the fact is, our country is more than eight years removed from the Sept. 11 attacks, and we were unable to stop Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab. His (yes, we have to say alleged) attack on Christmas Day would have succeeded if he’d, say, stayed in the bathroom and set off his bomb instead of returning to his seat to try to do so.
He wasn’t stopped by “the system” that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano famously claimed had “worked.” It was his fellow passengers who kept him from blowing up a plane and killing hundreds of people. Eight years after we all started removing our shoes at the airport, AbdulMutallab used the explosive PETN, the same substance Richard Reid had used in 2001 in his shoe-bombing attempt.