Having absorbed much of the commentary on President Obama’s speech last night, I have nothing to add here that hasn’t been said already by all of the usual bloggers and pundits. I will second a few thoughts though.
First, I thought the president seemed oddly unfazed by recent events. He certainly wasn’t ill at ease; indeed he seemed remarkably relaxed and confident — even, at times, downright cocky. (An affectation of his that I am finding harder and harder to bear as time goes on — the Mussolini-style chin lift — was in play throughout.)
He made several gestures toward the Right, mostly involving taxes. They are welcome, if sincere. I was also gratified to see him mention nuclear power, which should be an obvious candidate if we are serious about clean, independent energy.
He finally mentioned the health-care debacle, after about half an hour, and he did so in a way that I thought was either utterly delusional or deliberately offensive. He made no acknowledgement whatsoever of the many reasons that intelligent, patriotic citizens opposed the bill — its cost; its gross expansion of, and concentration of power in, the government; the scandalous way the votes were bought, etc. — but rather blamed himself only “for not explaining it more clearly to the American people.” This is not only insulting — he suggests that the only way anyone could object to his scheme is not to understand it, and that Americans citizens are so dense that despite his hundreds of speeches and press releases the problem was that they still needed more of his patient tutelage — it is also worryingly unmoored from reality. Many observers lately have been saying this is a sign of enormous (and possibly pathological) narcissism, and I will not hasten to disagree.
He also seemed, for all his calls to bipartisanship, unwilling to mend fences with the Republicans, choosing instead to berate and provoke them.
Perhaps the most startling moment was his castigation of the Supreme Court for their recent decision in United Citizens v. Federal Election Board — which was not only bad form (and his hesitation and ad-libbing at that moment showed, I think, that he knew he was about to behave badly), but also factually inaccurate, as Samuel Alito was quick to point out in a muttered objection that has been replayed continually all day today.
I really haven’t much more to add. In short, nothing much seems to have changed in Mr. Obama’s mind, though a great deal has changed all around him; I don’t think this speech did much to calm the waters. We’ll just have to see.