State of the Union Address

Wednesday afternoon, President Obama will sit down in the living room of an Omaha family to chat about the vision he laid out in Tuesday night’s State of the Union address.

(President Obama) “We just need to call them what they are – killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down and destroyed”. The message was plain: unless lawmakers put aside differences and do the hard work of compromise, his concluding 12 months in office would be a year wasted for the world’s most powerful nation.

Obama spent 40 minutes visiting with Lisa Martin, who sent him a letter a year ago that was written at 4 a.m. when she was awake feeding her son, Cooper, in which she described her “sinking feeling of dread and sadness” about climate change. Without naming the Republican frontrunner directly, Obama lamented the fact that the 2016 presidential campaign has resorted (more so than usual) to mudslinging and fearmongering. “We are looking forward to holding Hillary Clinton accountable for her role in the many failures of the Obama Administration”.

Change was a theme in the almost hour-long speech as the president began his eighth year – “extraordinary change” that was both inspirational as well as something that has stirred the current sense of national anxiety.

TRUMP: I wouldn’t say she’s off to a good start based on what she has just said, so you know, let’s see what happens. “And because we did, because we saw opportunity where others saw peril, we emerged stronger and better than before”, Obama said. “We’ve got some big choices ahead”, he said. If we don’t make a change, democracy is gone.

He also lashed out at rhetoric over the rise of the Islamic State group, which he admitted poses an enormous danger.

Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, also urged Americans to continue welcoming lawful immigrants and to resist the “siren call of the angriest voices”, a not-so-veiled reference to Trump.

Barnes said he was surprised by how lofty and abstract the State of the Union speech was and how little substance it had when it comes to rubber-meets-the-road issues facing Americans.

“Our Constitution begins with those three simple words, words we’ve come to recognize mean all the people, not just some; words that insist we rise and fall together”.

But Obama did offer some proposals, confronting a Congress largely hostile to his agenda by mentioning initiatives that are dead on arrival, including immigration reform and closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. “I’d be screaming from the hilltops that we need to integrate the civilian and veterans’ health systems for the sake of our veterans”, he said.