My state

Didn't post yesterday because of the State of the Union drinking game. You know the one. Every time Preznit Hopey Changey says the word "hope", drink a shot. "Change", two shots. Proposes a right-wing policy, three shots. Repeats right-wing talking points as if they were actual facts, four shots. By the end of the speech, a penguin is in no state to comment on *anything*, and the next day can't remember where his head is, much less use it to post.

Preznit Hopey Changey is about as disappointing as they come. His SOTU address had nothing in it that would actually help real Americans, who need jobs, who need protection against corporations intent upon outsourcing their jobs to China, who need help protecting themselves against banks that have plundered their retirement savings with fraudulent "mortgage-backed securities" and health insurers who continue to refuse to provide the contracted-for health care without repercussion, and... and... instead, he repeats the same right-wing talking points that have become "conventional wisdom" in the constrained bubble of the Washington elites.

I wasn't particularly enamored of Bill Clinton. Clinton was, as Alan Greenspan put it, "the best Republican president of the past thirty years". But at least Clinton had a plan, a strategy, a clue for escaping the bubble that Obama is encased in. It reminds me of a story that Richard Clark says about when Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks against Iraq. So he has to go on to television to justify these attacks... but did the missiles actually hit targets in Baghdad like they were supposed to? Is he going to make an idiot of himself by talking about an attack that never happened due to technical problems with the missile that caused it to hit, say, Saudi Arabia instead? He call in the generals and they say, "We don't know, it's night there, we won't be able to really tell until the morning when we can send a surveillance flight over." He calls in the CIA and they say, "we don't know, our agents in Baghdad report in on a schedule and their next scheduled reporting time isn't going to be until later this week." Bill thinks a few minutes, pulls out his rolodex, shuffles through it... and calls a Friend Of Bill who works for a major newspaper that he knows has a reporter in Baghdad and asks him if that reporter has seen or heard anything unusual like explosions or such. And gets the satellite phone number for that reporter, which he then uses to call that reporter, who says "Yes, air raid sirens went off and there was a huge explosion in the direction of one of the Presidential palaces." And, satisfied, goes on television and makes the speech. But there don't seem to be a collection of Friends Of Obama accumulated over the years who Obama can use to escape the bubble. Clinton famously loved to say "I feel your pain" but largely got away with it because people felt he really *did* feel their pain, on a personal and emotional level. Obama, on the other hand, does not seem to understand the pain ordinary people are feeling right now on anything other than an intellectual level. He makes stirring oratory about it, certainly. But the perception of Obama as out-of-touch on a personal level with the pain that ordinary Americans are feeling, and isolated in an intellectual bubble that leaves him incapable of touching Americans on a personal level where they live, is growing -- and if he doesn't do something about escaping that bubble, his one-term Presidency is going to make that of Jimmy Carter look like a rousing success.

-- Badtux the Political Penguin