It was a weird speech. There wasn’t a lot of substance. There were a lot of human props.
Most presidents would at least try to unify. Throwing a few lines about bipartisanship and unity aren’t that. This president isn’t in a position to unify, mainly because this administration isn’t capable of that sort of behavior. You don’t expect a parakeet to play fetch.
Most presidents would push policy that they’d been working on already. Opioid crisis? Lip service only, which makes sense in the context of what the administration has attempted. They haven’t done anything worth listing.
So the real state of the union is slow deterioration as we wait for the midterms, wait for Republicans to rediscover America, wait for the adults to stop coddling this broken administration.
The overture to infrastructure is so half-assed and not what we need. Maybe if the Republicans had taken up Obama on infrastructure, it could have worked. What we need, realistically, is a permanent infrastructure system.
So some infrastructure is priority. Most is steady-maintenance. You budget to cover priority and emergency and then whatever is left over, that goes to maintenance.
But their plan? Throw a tiny amount of money and hope that municipalities and the private sector figure out the rest.
Or the nod to prison reform, which comes as we learned the Bureau of Prisons is rewarding donors by shunting more prisoners to private prisons.
Or the umpteenth time he says prescription drug prices are going to magically drop.
It’s pathetic that this is what passes as a good speech by this president. It’s inexcusable that his party applauded it and his supporters cheered it without any indication of how bad it was.
At best, it was a short distraction from the 50 other distractions that this administration unleashes on the world like it’s some genetic breeding experiment gone awry.