#SOTU Preview goes full populist — will it work?
Obama’s final plea for hearts and minds
Next week, President Obama will stand before a joint session of Congress and deliver remarks on the state of the union—and he’s bringing some friends along for the ride.
From the President’s weekly address cum SOTU preview:
“Every day, we get thousands of letters and emails at the White House from Americans across the country, and every night, I read ten of them. They tell me about their hopes and their worries, their hardships and successes. They’re the Americans I’m working for every day, and this year, several of these letter writers will join me at the Capitol when I deliver my annual State of the Union address on Tuesday night.”
Their stories sound like anything a comms shop could dream up given 30 minutes and a pot of coffee, but they’re effective nonetheless. With the help of a small business loan, their business exploded, and everyone got a wage increase! Our policies made paying back their student loans easier, and they didn’t default!
Watch:
This is a tactic we’ve seen politicians on both sides of the aisle use to gin up support from a flagging base; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but whichever way the needle eventually falls it’s a safe bet for a speech not exclusive to one particular demographic.
I wrote earlier that the 2016 Republican primary cycle started exactly 5 minutes before anyone first mentioned the 2016 Republican primary cycle. If Obama is smart, the populist tack he took in his SOTU preview will serve as a signal to his own party that it’s time to start reconnecting with the base they lost touch with so thoroughly in 2014.
Candidates like Rick Perry and Scott Walker have already come out of the gate with a messaging scheme that focuses less on the party divide and more on what matters to every American—a bright American future untouched by big government incompetence or divisive racial and socioeconomic politics.
Democratic candidates already tried the blame-game end of the populist politics spectrum—that’s the mistake that served up the House and Senate for Republicans. If Democrats want to win in 2016, this “trot out the success stories” strategy is one of the few options they have left.
This weekly address will be the first in a long line of defensive hits against a resurgent Republican party, and it won’t be the last time we see the President trying to appeal to the emotions of those who haven’t paid a great deal of attention to how their lives have changed for the worst during his tenure as President.
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Comments
“every day I read ten of them”
I think he is lying.
Please note that he didn’t say how long he’d been getting 10 letters to read every night. He could easily have an aide give him ten letters to leaf through once a day for this week, with instructions of “write them a nice followup letter and autopen it.” It would take a whole minute out of his day.
It would be SOOOOOoooooo much better if he read his National Security Briefing in the morning.
But noooooo. I bet Mommy Jarret picks out ten of the most tongue-bathing letters, too.
Let me elaborate.
Alinsky coached hiding radical ends behind soothing, moderate, popular rhetoric.
Obama was very good at that, and it worked for a while.
People recognize the liar now; the crease is off the pants and his iron is out of steam.
…..well….. Obama Alinsky!
Down the O Hole of history………
Wake me when it’s Joni Ernst’ turn.
I haven’t listened to a SOTU since Reagan in 1985. They are predictable, overly long, and boring. If there is any news broken in the speech, that’s news of itself.
It’s noise without enlightenment – from either party. And the media pre- and post-speech analyses are worse. I’d rather listen to two hours of ’80s techno-pop dance music – and I hate ’80s techno-pop dance music.
Gee … will he bitch slap SCOTUS again this year?
With Zero, SOTU speech should really be renamed STFU speech. I cannot stand listening to that lying oxygen thief. I’d rather listen to Roseanne Barr screech the national anthem – and that was painful ~
Wait, it’s THIS Tuesday? Oh what a shame — I had planned to floss my dogs’ teeth that night.
Oh well. Unless he’s offering free 2-year passes to Dogwood dog park and subsidized pig ears, none of my guys are interested anyway.
#DoggieLivesMatter
“I am so glad President Obama (hummm….. hummmm…… hummmm) invite me to this State of The Union Address. I am so happy he gave my 14 year old daughter a free Obama phone this year. It was good because she was able to call me from the hospital to tell me that she was having a baby and Obamacare was making it all free. Last year, when she had the twins, I didn’t find out she was in the hospital until her pimp came and told me. He was so excited he fell off his bicycle and broke his arm but Obamacare paid for all his hospital bills and now he got disability so he bought a new Escalade and got rid of that old bicycle.”
How thrilling…..Yawn….President O-BedBug……Drooling again on national TV……….
Once a president has forfeited his credibility it doesn’t matter what choice he makes to proceed. By his own works, he is not to be trusted or believed.
A better, more accurate subtitle would be:
Obama’s final plea for hearts and mindlessness
They’re really having a hard time getting his red eyes disguised with makeup. Looks more washed out with every passing day.
The trouble remains that he still has he sycophant believers, nothing will change as far as his base goes. The lefty media, which remains committed to their commie/marxist ideology, will support and cover for him – from now through all the rewrites of his history.
He’s going to destroy the 2016 Democrat candidate if he does go populist … any policy he promotes will then be off limits for the ’16 candidate to run on or else the GOP will just paint them as Obama Lite …
(SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH)
He can dream full populist all he wants. It will be canceled out by the headlines generated by the continual unfolding consequences of Obamacare in 2015 and 2016.
Taxing workers to redistribute to non-workers is NOT Populist. It is merely Communist.