I decided not to liveblog the SOTU this year because I was pretty sure it would be an unusually uneventful speech. And I think that’s how it turned out. (Transcript here.) In the end, the only thing that surprised me was how uneventful it was. With only a very few exceptions that were passed over pretty quickly (healthcare reform is great, student loan reform is great), there was almost literally nothing in there that couldn’t have been in a George W. Bush speech. It was intensely technocratic and bipartisan: we need better education, we need to invest in infrastructure, we need to concentrate on innovation, we need tax reform, we need to get the deficit down, we’re going to crush the Taliban, etc. etc. And even if you grant that “invest” is just another word for “spend,” he was mostly talking about the kind of spending the Republicans could, in theory, go along with.
As for the responses, what can you say? Paul Ryan probably did about as well as anyone could do with one of those things, but his speech was mushy and vague to the point of parody. Michele Bachmann had a bit more pep to her step, but her attempt to pretend that the economy was great under George Bush was pretty laughable.
All in all, not a memorable night. Which is too bad, in a way, since I think Obama’s education/technology/infrastructure message is actually pretty important. It’s too bad nobody is really in a mood to hear it right now.
POSTSCRIPT: And a note to John Boehner: dude, we know you’re a Republican. Obama is the opposition. We get it. But your preposterously ostentatious boredom during the entire speech really needs to go. You should at least pretend you’re not in junior high school anymore.
