I had already written a piece for this week's TFP when I suggested to Editor-in-Chief Michael Miller that I might be able to do a State Of The Union (SOTU) piece given a bit of time. His suggestion was pretty much to the effect that I would get 24 hours to do so if I wanted to make it timely.
I was reminded of the famous quote by 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' author Douglas Adams, when he said: "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."
Ever-willing to take on a challenge however, I sat down and wrote another piece, "SOTU: SSDD". In listening to both the speech itself and the Republican response, I found myself taken with how much I had heard from preceding residents of the White House, regardless of the political party that they came from, mixed with some new material that struck me as either annoying or amusing. (I also found myself wishing that I could get back the 90 minutes of my life that I lost to the effort of watching well-rehearsed political rhetoric.)
While it's impossible to capture the everything from a speech that lasts over an hour, I think that I hit most of the highlights within the restrictions of an 800 word column. To capture the true feeling of the event however, one would have to combine the experiences being beaten for an hour with a Nerf bat, having a heart attack, banging your head against the wall (cause it feels good when you stop) and being bitten to death by ducks.
If however, you would prefer to instead capture some of the feeling of what is happening in Toledo and NW Ohio, you are going to have to read this weekend's addition of Toledo's largest circulation Sunday and best weekly newspaper, the Toledo Free Press.
(I am waiting to hear back from Michael Miller now to see if I will be using the original effort I produced as a replacement for the mid-week blog effort that I failed to.)
Far too many people have already commented on the content and delivery of President Obama's recent State of the Union message, as well as the Republican and Tea Party responses; so I won't bore you with my own blow-by-blow on the subject. Besides, history has continued on its course and the speech has already been supplanted in the news by world events in Egypt and the blizzard recently experienced across much of the Midwest and the East.
In point of fact, the latest SOTU was pretty a typical and forgettable example of recent ones delivered by presidents of both parties; long on rhetoric and short on details. It may have broken no new policy ground, but neither did it create new controversy. It simply went over much of the same doctrine that has been espoused by President Obama since he began campaigning for office, and was just another in a string of fairly well-written and well-delivered political speeches by a president who does pretty well reading off of a teleprompter.
In going over my own thoughts on the SOTU however, I found them drifting to "The West Wing", an Aaron Sorkin series that has been off the air for a couple of years now. While Mr Sorkin's political views are for the most part diametrically opposed to my own, his skill (and that of the other series writing contributors) in crafting the show in general, and in particular the political speeches given by President Bartlett (played by Martin Sheen) always captured me.
The more I thought about it, the more the words of the latest SOTU faded away, to be replaced by the soaring rhetoric of a fictional president on a canceled TV series.
I realized that even while we can disagree with the politics of the person speaking, we can nevertheless appreciate a well-written, well-delivered line.
While there were a couple of episodes covering the SOTU that I could have used to illustrate my point, I chose another speech instead from the episode entitled "20 Hours In America". It's short enough to make my case and good enough to illustrate the necessity of really good speech writers to craft the soaring rhetoric of political speeches.
Besides, I was particularly taken by the comment made by Bruno Gianelli (played by Ron Silver) to Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn (played by Rob Lowe), one of the president's principal speech writers. I have always viewed it as the ultimate compliment to a writer and something to aspire to one day about my own humble efforts.
So I would ask those of you who found the speech a particularly effective one (apparently so, since the president got a 90% approval rating for the speech) and even those who didn't; to instead of judging the president on his message, consider instead the people behind the scenes who sweated for weeks over every word and turn of phrase to create it. Remember as well that the best actor in the world can only perform as well as the script he is given.
The president has now delivered his annual State of the Union address, and for those of us with the intestinal fortitude to listen to it, we now find ourselves in a state of incredulity, disbelief, and almost terminal boredom.
In all fairness, this is not entirely the president's fault. Most of those who in recent years have sat in the White House have used this address to a joint session of Congress in an attempt to obscure the real issues of the country with more smoke than I have blown since I began I began enjoying cigars, let alone writing this blog. Mr Obama has merely lived up to (or perhaps down to) the level of rhetoric that we expect from presidents at such events. Add in the minority response and the spin from political operative and pundits on both sides of the aisle and you end up with something best disposed of under strict Hazmat regulations.
I will therefore not try to add to the obfuscation by putting my own two cents in. I will however, point out some dirty little secrets that did not come out last night, and will likely never come out in any address to Congress or the public. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers discussed in a recent Heritage Foundation piece speak on it however, and they are very interesting indeed. For those of you unwilling to read the entire article, the highlights are:
- At a time when overall employment is falling around the country, the number of union employees working for the government at various levels rose by 64,000.
- At a time when many are concerned about the money provided to auto makers (now largely owned by the government and the unions), we find that three times more union employees work in the Post Office than the auto industry.
- In fact, 52% of all union workers now work for the government at the local, state, or national level.
- Union government workers earn an average of $39.83 per hour in wages and benefits, where those in the private sector earn only $27.49 per hour.
- In recent health care negotiations, union workers were granted exemption until 2017 for taxation on so-called "Cadillac health care plans", while non-union workers with similar plans would begin to pay taxes immediately.
What the article goes on to point out is that when union wages and benefits take too much of the profit from a company, that company will no longer be able to compete and will ultimately lose to its competitors and go out of business (unless its bailed out by the government, of course). When the same thing happens with regards to government union worker, the additional revenue required to meet the requirements of these demands comes from ... us.
This is not to say that membership in a union automatically demonizes a person, it does not. What it does say however is that it would be a failure of logic not to recognize that Unions have become one of a growing number of self-perpetuating bureaucracies in this country.
Saying that Government is one of the other great offenders in this category would be an understatement. Putting the two together I fear is not a problem added to itself, but one that is squared instead.
If you consider the considerable influence that Unions can therefore have on the government: as a political contributor, as an entity that can quickly put membership on the street to stump for a candidate, and as a part of the greater mechanism of government itself; one cannot help but wonder if the government in general, this Administration in particular (with its close ties to Unions like SEIU), and the professional politicians in Congress of both parties are more concerned with the "State of the Union" or the "State of the Unions".
