President Gasbag

After watching President Obama's State of the Union, plus the first Republican response to it by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and the second response by Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, chair of the tea party caucus in Congress, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that if nations survive and prosper by realistic assessment of their problems, America really is finished.

Obama surely instructed his speechwriters to capitalize on his successful outing to the memorial in Tucson, where he gave a speech that essentially reprised the campaign rhetoric of 2008 that got him elected in the first place. The result in Congress on Tuesday night was the quintessence of gasbaggery.

The keynote was unity, symbolized by Democrats and Republicans eschewing their normal factional seating pattern in favor of interspecies mixing. Rep. Joe Wilson, famous for having shouted "You lie" at Obama during his health care speech to a joint session of Congress in 2009, now sat demurely next to two lady Democrats.

The consequence was a markedly less spirited, partisan affair. Instead of bounding to their feet in raptures of applause or snarling in their chairs, the nation's legislators sat demure and glassy-eyed as Obama gave a pep rally on America's crisis.

It was all very, very familiar. America has lost its technological dominance. Solution: Kennedy's New Frontier, when the shocking challenge of the Russian Sputnik, launched into space in 1957, led to the U.S. moon shot, which in turn "unleashed an age of innovation." America now faces another "Sputnik moment." The challenge: to "out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world."

This is to be achieved by a green revolution in energy, better schools and teachers, efficient government subservient to the needs of business and less debt.

From the 1970s, we got a reprise by Obama of presidents Nixon's and Carter's pledges of energy independence. Obama's version was spectacular in its divorce from reality. He made the commitment that by 2035 — five presidential terms after his last conceivable day in office in 2016 — 80 percent of America's energy "will come from renewable sources." It turned out in the next sentence that he was counting not only wind and solar, but also coal, natural gas and nuclear power as "renewable." Even so, without oil, the notion is nutty.

Every president calls for Americans to do better at science. Clinton made a veritable industry out of it, also out of "reinventing government," which Obama also proposes to rehab in the form of a new onslaught on burdensome regulation, so crippling to the American entrepreneurial spirit.

The deficit is to be fought by a freeze in annual domestic spending for the next five years, which will reduce the deficit by $400 billion and reduce discretionary spending, Obama vowed, to the level of the Eisenhower years.

This pledge seems to undercut the government investment required for a green energy revolution, plus a high-speed rail network, not to mention our old friend — probably the most realistic passage in the entire speech — a redoubling investment in road and bridge repair, the standard make-work ploy of every president trying to create jobs.

The left got a vague pledge from Obama not to mess with Social Security plus a rhetorical kick at the oil companies.

There was even a very vague hint, in a sentence about cutting back the complexity of the tax code, that Obama might head toward giving up the progressive tax system altogether and go for a flat tax (which spells out as roughly an 18 percent rate for poor and rich alike, a putative levy much appreciated by the billionaires).

Obama's address was swiftly followed by an official rebuttal from Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, noted for calling for the swift privatization of Social Security.

His recipe for recovery: "limited government, low taxes, reasonable regulations, and sound money ... Limited government and free enterprise have helped make America the greatest nation on earth. These are not easy times, but America is an exceptional nation."

Then — screened only by CNN — came the fiery Bachmann, fresh from an outing to Iowa last weekend where she claimed the Founding Fathers had been stalwart foes of slavery and had successfully labored to end it, which would have come as news to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Bachmann's star is rising as the new Sarah Palin. She certainly gave the most spirited presentation of the evening in five short minutes, replete with the sort of charts Glenn Beck likes to use.

She dwelled on a fact omitted by Obama from the resume of his successes, namely that the unemployment rate is still at 9.4 percent, despite a $3 trillion increase in the deficit: "Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill."

That's tea party talk, which at least has the virtue of concreteness. Bachmann did not fail to note that "America is the indispensable nation of the world."

The relationship of war — as currently waged in Afghanistan — to the national deficit was not raised by any of the speakers. Ryan and Bachmann made no mention of military spending. All three ignored the export of jobs, the destruction of American manufacturing and the pauperization of American families. Obama seemed to be trying to stage a replay of his own, a recreation of the U.S. economy in the 1950s.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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