A Missed Opportunity

In his legendary Gettysburg Address, President Abraham Lincoln turned out to be quite wrong when he said "the world will little note, nor long remember" his remarks. But in general, presidential speeches are far from memorable.

We had hoped President Barack Obama's State of the Union address last night would be an exception. Millions of the Americans who voted for him in 2008 are recoiling from Washington's massive deficit spending, its bailouts of Wall Street, insurers and automakers and its attempts to radically remake the U.S. health care system. These largely centrist, independent voters were not seeking an administration whose members saw the nation's economic crisis as an "opportunity" to impose drastic change. But that is what they got — and is what they are now rejecting.

We hoped Obama would use his speech to acknowledge his misjudgment of the national mood. We hoped he would outline a new agenda, focused on economic growth and a much more sober attitude about federal spending.

It didn't happen.

In fairness, his decision to end the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military, if handled adroitly, could prove a coup.

His push for tax breaks for small businesses that hire new workers is overdue.

But his claim that "green jobs" are the path to economic nirvana is fantasy. His attempt to tamp fears about out-of-control spending flopped. Touting a spending cap on a limited part of the budget while hundreds of billions of dollars are still forecast to be added to the national credit card each year isn't reassuring. And his decision to blame his health care setbacks on partisanship and poor marketing — instead of a lack of public support for his proposal — was deeply disappointing.

It's as though Scott Brown's shocking win last week in the Massachusetts Senate race never happened. It's as if all the polls showing mass pubic anxiety over ballooning national debt didn't exist.

The president is right when he says the "deficit of trust" felt by Americans preceded his election. But he only adds to that deficit when he concludes that what the nation wants is a better-executed view of his extreme initial agenda. Instead, the public wants a much more pragmatic, centrist version of this agenda — and a laser-like focus on reviving the private-sector economy.

REPRINTED FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE.

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