David Horowitz

Posted by David Horowitz on Jan 28th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage.

Historically, State of the Union speeches leave no trace. Their impact on presidential approval ratings is nil. Their utility, therefore, is in what they reflect about the presidential character and the presidential course. Last night President Obama gave a speech that was at times quite eloquent, and on occasion rhetorically empty. But at all times it was the speech of a man who is deeply partisan and dangerously arrogant and is determined to stay a course which has already damaged his party, weakened his country at home and exposed it to attack from abroad.

Over and over again the President demonstrated a troubling disconnect from reality, striking in the leader of a political democracy, and indicative of a narcissism that appears to be greater than President Clinton’s. “I have never been more hopeful about America’s future than I am tonight,” he said at the outset of his speech. This in a country with 17 million unemployed, a political majority that is unable to govern, and a national security apparatus that couldn’t identify a terrorist whose own father had turned him in.

Pres. Obama at the State of the Union

In the course of his speech, as Charles Krauthammer observed, the President attacked “Washington” seven times in the name of the people, as though he and his party were not Washington, as though the course he had set for his party and his country was not the source of the people’s rage. Taken as a whole it was an hour-long campaign speech, in which he broke precedent to attack not only the previous Republican Administration and all the Republicans in the chamber but even the Supreme Court justices present as well. And then – as though he had not done that – he scolded the entire assemblage for being politicians instead of non-partisan statesmen, and for running “permanent campaigns.”

For more please visit: http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/28/obama%e2%80%99s-destructive-course/