SOTUS 2012

Opening: celebrating leaving Iraq, daring the Republicans not to cheer, not to call leaving Iraq a "victory."
Now there are "no Americans fighting in Iraq."  [Not in the armed forces, perhaps, but we're still indirectly paying for mercenaries there.]  "Courage, selflessness..."
Reminder a couple minutes in: Osama bin Laden is dead.
The armed forces win because they work together.  "Imagine what we could accomplish if we worked together."  [But we're not an army: we're a diverse collection of individuals, boisterously so.  Unfortunately, he'll come back to this at the end.  Ring composition.]
Education; high-tech manufacturing.  [Manufacturing?  Yep, this is a key theme of the speech.  Wonder if Obama read this terrific article in the Atlantic about the challenges of change on the manufacturing front in this country?]
Yes to energy "that we can control."
Yes to "an economy built to last."  [Unfortunate auto industry associations.]
Rewarding responsibility, rewarding hard work.  [A missed opportunity.  Surely an orator as good as Obama could find some way to talk about why the economy has changed, why blue-collar jobs don't pay like they used to, why corporate ethos has changed to allow for late-career lay-offs and gigantic pay raises for successful -- and failing -- CEOs.  But no.  Rather --]
"We can do this."  Grandfather made it on the GI Bill, grandmother on the assembly line.
"This is the defining issue of our time": how to keep mid-20th century opportunities alive.
Restore an economy "where everyone who works hard gets a fair shot."
"Bankers made bets and bonuses while everyone looked the other way."  [Did I write too soon?  Is the big-picture critique on its way?]
Finally: "The state of our union is getting stronger."
Manufacturing, again.  [Scratch comment above.  The laundry list of tax credits and spending programs begins.  Shades of Bill Clinton.]
I saved the auto industry.  GM is top of the world, ma!
Stop tax deductions for companies that outsource jobs.  Lower taxes for companies hiring in-country.
Support community colleges and partnerships with business.
A jab at teacher unions.  A call for merit pay and firing bad teachers fast.
Raise the minimum school age to 18?
Colleges and universities had better keep costs down!  [But why have they gone up?]
Let illegals who go to college become citizens; let foreigners who earn college degrees here in the US stay here.
Expand tax relief for small business.
Spend more on research.
Spend more on energy research.
Spend more on clean energy subsidies.
Open more domestic oil fields and gas resources.
The Department of Defense is going green!  [What a relief.]
Responsible homeowners need to be able to re-finance easily.
Regulation is good.  [The base knows this: and he doesn't really make an effort to convince the unbelievers.  Another missed opportunity.]
The Deficit.  "We need to make choices."  We need to tax millionaires.  This is not "class warfare"; it's "common sense".
Americans are cynical about Washington.  So let's "ban insider trading" for members of Congress.  [Insider trading? That came out of nowhere.  But the real problem is: not a whiff of real reform of lobbying (a missed anti-Newt opportunity); not a breath of campaign finance reform.  But then again, the pig doesn't set the trough on fire.]
We need Consensus.  Let's Stop Fighting.  Or rather, let's Keep Fighting, but Together, like members of the team that assassinated Obama.  [What did he just say?]

As real bloggers like to say: Reax.  As I listened to the speech -- and this is sad proof of the sharp recent decline in American political oratory -- it struck me as fairly well-constructed, effectively if not brilliantly delivered, statesmanlike without pomposity, a bit laundry-listish but a reasonable balance between concrete proposals and the typical platitudes.  A safe election-year speech, as opposed to a riskier visionary one.
Yet as I type my notes, I can't help being discomfited by just how squarely conventional the speech was: how Clintonesque, how compromised, how different from the promise and the vision of his speeches during the 2008 campaign.  This isn't a deep surprise to me -- I'm used to being disappointed by this president, though I'm not half as bitter as Andrew Sullivan or many New York liberals -- but I remain unsettled by Obama's choice to avoid taking the big issues.   He repeatedly told his audience tonight, "we can do this." But he, it seems, cannot do this -- when "this" means hard-hitting, thoughtful, accessible analysis that grounds a powerful call for justice.   Nor can he recover the freshness, the sense that here was someone thinking new thoughts, that he brought to those early election-year speeches.
And the ring composition about the military, which ended with a call for Americans to imitate the military and "watch each other's backs," was awful.  What are we supposed to be fighting against?  This is a good example of pro-warrior republicanist rhetoric gone bad.  It leaves a sour taste in my mouth.