Lackluster Effort on SOTU

If that was supposed to be Obama's kickoff re-election speech, he's in big trouble. To say it was duller than dishwater would be an understatement. I have always been confused over the press' conclusion that he is a gifted orator; I often find him very hard to listen to. I did not get an A in my public speaking class in college. In fact, I may have started a near riot with a speech I gave on the university president. But I did take public speaking, and I did pass the class, making it one of the few subjects I have any formal training in. I find Obama to be a mediocre speaker, at best. He has a very hard time putting any emotion or personal feeling into anything he says. Anyone can read the phone book, but very few people can make it interesting. Without his punchlines like, "Yes, we can!," and "Keep the change," he really can't hold the audiences attention.

He mentioned jobs fifteen times last night. He only mentioned the economy four times. I'm absolutely shocked that the leading issue among adult Americans would get such little attention from our leader. He did mention lowering the corporate tax rate, but only if it was deficit neutral. I'm no economist, but I would stake my professional opinion on the idea that lowering, or even abolishing, the corporate tax rate would increase GDP. Lowering the corporate tax rate would lower the cost of goods and services, increasing consumption, thereby creating jobs. Its fairly simple.

Something that surprised me about the speech last night was that he only mentioned "bi-partisan" and "work together" a total of seven times. I was expecting to hear one or the other about a hundred times. Another important subject that I thought he only paid lip service to was the deficit. And his discussion of that subject seemed to ignore his contributions (more than all the other presidents combined) to our future insolvency. I am really starting to wonder what we are spending all that money on. People say entitlements, but those entitlements are supposed to be coming out of our paychecks. And he promised to invest in infrastructure. We pay a tax on gasoline to cover those expenses. Maybe we need to check the books and see what they are really spending all of our money on.