The State of the Union coverage on PBS last night had a slightly bizarre analysis as the speech ended.
PBS NewsHour anchor Gwen Ifill jumped in over the applause. “And that completes the president's sixth State of the Union speech, by our total it runs about exactly one hour, in which he talked about this being a breakthrough year for America and he seems to be taking on a victory lap.”
A victory lap? After he just got crushed in the midterms, with the House Republican majority the largest it’s been since the 1920s?
New York Times columnist David Brooks made a candid admission, after bizarrely thinking candidate Obama was a centrist: “He is more liberal, certainly than I thought in 2008. I thought it was a very liberal speech, but just as a speech, I thought it was pretty well-crafted.”
A little later, Brooks brought up the president’s feigned ignorance of the midterms: “This was an in-your-face speech to Republicans, and we saw how miserable John Boehner looked sitting back there. This was not a conciliatory speech, and this is amazing, amazing that this guy just got crushed in the election and he comes out very strong, very assertive, the growing economy helps. But you wouldn’t know he just got crushed in an election.”
Maybe Obama thinks the folks at home have already forgotten the score from the last election?
This exchange was also priceless. You can’t say Obama sounds like a European (ahem, socialist) without liberals getting suspicious:
BROOKS: I think the domestic policy part was strong thematically, and I liked how they organize in three baskets of security, skills, and competitiveness. But it was very European. You know, a lot of the things he said, other countries have this, they have sick leave, they have childcare, they have free education, free that -- there was a lot of free -- and there are tradeoffs obviously involved in that --
IFILL: Is European code for what?
BROOKS: It’s code for European. [Laughter.]
SHIELDS: Why don’t you just say socialism! Come on, David!
Brooks tried to insist he wasn’t saying that was bad policy, just that there are tradeoffs like higher unemployment. As the show wrapped up, Brooks said the case for the Keystone pipeline was “overwhelming,” but he threw in a weird pitch for a higher gas tax or carbon tax:
BROOKS: He could have talked about a gas tax, and that's something pretty much every Republican economist supports. [?] So that's really taking the debate out of the small ball and putting in the big ball. A gas tax, some sort of carbon tax, it raises revenue, it helps the environment, it's an economic plus if you compensate and make it progressive. It's just a policy that a lot of bipartisan economists support and a president in the fourth quarter who wants to take some risks, that would be a fantastic one.
