Don’t feel ashamed if President Obama’s State of the Union address seemed bewildering. Perhaps you felt like factually false assertions kept coming out of the president’s mouth — not debatable or tendentious statements, but stuff that just plain isn’t true, and that could have easily been fact-checked by his speech writers. That’s because such assertions did keep coming — again and again.
This might explain quite a bit. Obama, it appears, begins his discussion of public affairs from a completely different set of premises than those who read the news and keep up on the world.
“In Iraq and Syria,” Obama said, “American leadership — including our military power — is stopping [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s] advance.” That just isn’t the case — and Vice President Joe Biden admitted as much in a televised interview the following morning.
Obama claimed the U.S. was “supporting a moderate opposition in Syria that can help us in this effort.” NBC’s war correspondent Richard Engel, who has spent tons of time working in that war zone, said that U.S. military officials refer to this capable, moderate Syrian opposition as “the unicorn” because it only exists in legend. “It sounded like the president is outlining a world he wishes we lived in,” Engel said of Obama’s speech. MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, not exactly a right-wing media figure, said with a regretful tone of voice that on this matter Obama’s comments were “not close to reality.”
Obama also declared that “Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.” This isn’t true either. Even amidst negotiations, Iran has — as the current agreement permits — continued enriching more uranium, building reactors that could produce weapons-grade plutonium and developing intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Obama’s false statements were not limited to the field of foreign affairs. He claimed U.S. wages are rising (they are not) and otherwise painted a picture of an America with high economic growth, low unemployment, increased health coverage and improving services for veterans. He made no direct mention of the massive scandal that is still roiling his Veterans’ Affairs department; no acknowledgment of the widespread discontent with Obamacare or its harmful side-effects. He obviously avoided noting that the share of Americans working for a living has hit multi-decade lows, whereas means-tested entitlement programs continue to serve record-setting numbers of people who previously were able to make ends meet on their own.
No, judging by Obama’s rosy outlook, Americans have never had it so good. Peace and prosperity are back.
Yet somehow, the same Americans were so unaware of the new era of good times that they repudiated Obama and his agenda in November’s election. Why, if everything is awesome, did the voters just punish Obama’s party with the loss of nine U.S. Senate seats and the largest Republican majority in the U.S. House since Herbert Hoover’s administration? Why did voters clear the Democratic Party out of statehouses and state legislatures across the nation if America has turned a page from the era of war and economic pain?
Could it be that the rest of America just isn’t as perceptive as Obama and his speechwriters? Or is it that America’s president has lost touch with the people he governs, with their concerns and with facts in general?
