State of the Union

It was President Obama versus 298 Republicans in both houses Tuesday night. And that looked unfair to the Republicans.

State of the Union addresses have been fun in recent memory. Watching Clinton was easy, because of the theater. “Yeah, you Republican interns. You see this economy? I’m get-ting cre-dit for-it…nanny nanny boo boo!”

For the first twenty minutes of the 2011 State of the Union, it looked like Obama was wayyy off his game. He was generic, competent, and, well, kinda boring. Some of us know that there will be a moment when President Obama has a bad speech. It seemed like this one was going to be it.

This speech was not it.

For those of us who have watched Obama work a room, there are few who can touch him for technique. The New Civility seating arrangement really worked to the President’s advantage. It worked so well, that one wonders if he didn’t consider proposing a tax on Baptist bookstores just to see how many Republicans he could get to clap for it.

For crying out loud, Boehner was clapping for things which will get him a new orifice for excretory function from Fox News. To his credit, Boehner must have gotten hold of a terrific mood elevator, because he only misted up once. But he appeared to be either hammered or lost, like a kid who arrives to take the SAT and realizes about two questions in that there is no way in hell that he’s bluffing his way through this test.

Barack Obama did not have that problem. When he hit the message about 80% clean energy by 2035, he pitched it like a Republican. For twenty years, Democrats have been selling the environment to liberals.

Ask Al Gore how well that works when running for President, sometime. The environment is Crack Cocaine for liberals. It makes the left stupid and willing to do anything for more of it. President Obama took the left to Rehab.

Elections are not won by selling the environment to liberals any more than they are won selling guns to conservatives. Elections are won by making sense to the middle. President Obama started doing something extremely astute by playing to the center.

Invoking the space program, the President’s rhetoric touched on the value of clean energy for defense, education and jobs. In an economy which by circumstance has become much more global than a lot of people would like, the point of grabbing the future from our economic rivals is cogent. The reality that policies embraced by his Republican opposition have put resources in such a place as to place the nation at a competitive disadvantage can, and will make sense to independents and moderates.

There was not a hint of environmentalism to Obama’s treatment of clean energy as a generator of security for the nation, except as a favorable byproduct. That is something the middle has not really heard before.

The Republican Party approached this State of the Union with one of the worst game strategies that they have ever used. They set everything off with a block from their right and sealing all of the routes up the left. That might work on Dennis Kucinich, or Bernie Sanders. If this were football, they would have watched some game film to know that Obama likes to run up the middle.

The Republican Party is also facing a resurgent Obama at a time when their party is in disarray. There is little room for multiple and sometimes differing messages. A divided party will cave in upon itself. It happened two years ago when Sarah Palin wound up on the ticket, becoming the de facto head. It also happened last night.

In the official Republican rebuttal, it became clear, instantly, that the speech was prepared well in advance of Obama’s speech. What was also evident was that whoever prepared the speech had zero grasp of the President’s articulation or capacity. And Representative Paul Ryan, like Charles Boustany and Bobby Jindal before him, was spectacularly ill equipped to compete with President Obama’s polished rhetorical skills.

It did not help that Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen offered the same inadequate speech in Spanish on Univision, albeit with a much stronger rhetorical capacity. Representative Ryan resembled little so much as Topher Grace portraying an adult Eddie Munster.

Representative Michelle “Guano” Bachmann offered a rebuttal for the ever-shrinking ranks of the Tea Party. For a group of people who kvetch incessantly about Obama using a TelePrompTer, you would think that they could mount the blamed thing in the same area code as the camera. Apparently, Rep. Bachmann was sitting in DC, and the TelePrompTer was somewhere on top of the Springfield Interchange in Virginia.

Republicans could scarcely have done worse by letting Sarah Palin ad-lib, and Huckabee might actually have been good.

At the moment, President Obama and the Democrats have altered the game-they are now using the right’s verbiage and tone with the older Center Left message. The last political figure who married his opposition’s tone to his own philosophy? Ronald Reagan.

This just got extremely interesting.