Three Degrees of Demagoguery

In a word, the State of the Union is stupefied.

The President, under pressure to rally a nation while placating a patchwork Congress, did his oratorical best but looked like a man leaning backward while urging Americans to "out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world" in the future.

Unlike Tuscon, this speech came, as it had to, less from Barack Obama's heart than a region of his political brain calculated to co-opt GOP opposition while laying out a blueprint for future growth. But that meant glossing over really hard choices to be made now in the face of public dissatisfaction and distrust. (His low point was trying to make Boehner blubber by mentioning his saloon-sweeping days.)

In that sense, the President practiced what a conservative New York Times columnist calls "The Politics of Evasion" by not mentioning non-Republican elephants in the room--entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare that threaten the government's solvency.

If he can be accused of demagoguery by omission, the opposing responses were full frontal in their distortion of American reality in 2011.

In the official rebuttal, Rep. Paul Ryan presented a plausible argument against government spending, omitting only the reasons for it and his own Draconian proposals for slashing it, the mask slipping just once in warning about transforming "our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency."


If Ryan was slippery, Michelle Bachmann was Tea Party loony, with a misplaced teleprompter aptly making her look like she was talking to some fringe on her right, while dopey charts showed deficits rising steeply under Obama after Bush.

None of the night's three speakers addressed the reality of the past two years--that Barack Obama was sworn into management of a burning building and had little choice but to aim fire hoses of spending at unfreezing credit markets, saving Detroit and trying to stimulate the economy.

Whether he always did it wisely or well is not the main point, but accusing him of using too much water to put out the fires is a textbook definition of demagoguery.

Now that this stupefying "debate" is over, the President can go on to arm-wrestle Congress on where to spend and where to cut.

"At times Tuesday night," says a Times editorial, "Mr. Obama was genuinely inspiring with a vision for the country to move forward with confidence and sense of responsibility. Americans need to hear a lot more like that from him."

In detail.