SOTU reactions the morning after

I wasn’t able to catch last night’s State of the Union address, so I’ve been poking around this morning to see what I missed. (I might start with reading the full text of the speech here. Apparently there was something about salmon…?) The Wall Street Journal sums up what I’ve been seeing in a lot of quarters:

The speech was designed to show that Mr. Obama, just two months after suffering deep bruises in the midterm election, has a grasp of what a previous president called the vision thing. With its talk of investing in education, basic research and new technologies, the address marked a conscious effort to end the phase of his presidency focused on getting the country out of its economic mess, and to move on to a search for what is beyond the mess.

Yet the vision he sketched out isn’t likely to win over skeptics on the right. They think his talk of cutting spending in some areas is more than trumped by his desire to spend more in other areas. And they already doubt his new pledges to ratchet back regulation.

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On the subject of spending, Calvin Woodward at the AP has an interesting “fact check” to see how the numbers break down in Obama’s proposals — and finds more spending than cutting.

So what did people think? Anything new under the sun here? What about Paul Ryan’s response, or Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party re-response? And how did that whole non-partisan seating arrangement work out? I hear it actually made for fewer applause lines — which, if true, would be enough to call it a success in my book.

Finally, YouTube is hosting an “interview” with the president tomorrow, with questions submitted by users. What questions would you propose?

Author

  • Margaret Cabaniss

    Margaret Cabaniss is the former managing editor of Crisis Magazine. She joined Crisis in 2002 after graduating from the University of the South with a degree in English Literature and currently lives in Baltimore, Maryland. She now blogs at SlowMama.com.

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