The SOTU Speech

I never give much credence to SOTU speeches to begin with, but given the political climate over the past several weeks, this one was supposed to be “special”.

Generally, I never  really agree with Matt Yglesias on anything but he’s one of the better liberal bloggers out there, and I agree 100% with what he says here:

[...] Obama is fantastic at delivering formal speeches and has a fantastic speechwriting stuff. The past twelve months are a reminder that giving fantastic setpiece speeches has limits as a political strategy. You drop out of speech mode into the realm of cold, hard vote-counting and I don’t think anything’s really changed in that regard.

Again, giving great speeches only takes you so far and I think that the country tired of that months ago.  I thought the speech was pretty standard fare for a SOTU, not the big call-to-arms on healthcare reform that liberals wanted it to be, which I’m sure will cause some hand-wringing and continue the progressive vs centrist flame wars that have been raging over healthcare over the past few weeks.

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