Empty Rhetoric at the State of the Union

Every year, I subject myself to the President's State of the Union address.  I started watching regularly when extra credit was offered in my seventh grade social studies class for turning in a handwritten summary the next day, and I haven't missed one since.

I'm not sure why.  President Bush or President Obama, Republican or Democrat, the State of the Union is an endless loop of why America, the Union is so great and strong.  Everyone applauds, the only audible partisan outrage only ever reveals itself on matters of taxes and Social Security.  The rhetoric gets analyzed and analyzed some more.  The President gets a minor popularity bump by virtue of, you know, public-speaking ability.

Perhaps its the economic gloom that's gripped ahold of me, but I really don't have it in me to hear President Obama tell me that whatever challenges we face, everything is going to be a-okay as soon as he puts another proposal before Congress that will somehow unlock the potential of the American people.  This year's speech, according to The Atlantic's preview, will "unveil a blueprint for competitiveness."  From this week's radio address after President Hu Jintao's state visit, a taste of things to come:

I know we can win that competition. I know we can out-compete any other nation on Earth. We just have to make sure we're doing everything we can to unlock the productivity of American workers, unleash the ingenuity of American businesses, and harness the dynamism of America's economy.

We hear this speech after speech, year after year, but it's not true.  I just polished off my paper-copy of last month's Atlantic, which compares the clean energy industry in the United States and China, concluding that "the saddest aspect of the U.S. performance, he said, is that it seems not deliberate but passive and accidental, the product of modern America’s inability to focus public effort on public problems."

“No one in the U.S. government could ever imagine a 10-year plan to ensure U.S. leadership in solar power or batteries or anything else,” Joseph Romm, a former Department of Energy official who now writes the blog Climate Progress, told me. “It’s just not possible, so nobody even bothers to propose it.”

Instead of any sort of concrete initiative, we'll get more rhetoric from the President.  (I personally look forward to the token line about renewable energy, e.g., ethanol, and a quick cut away to Iowa's senators beaming.   I've seen it now for years.)  What will truly be fun or sad, depending upon one's global point of view, is when the public wakes up to the reality that the United States is not and will not be able to "out-compete" the world for much longer.

When the empire comes to an end, woe to the first President to rise for his/her State of the Union and explain who and what was responsible for squandering America's global supremacy.  Now that'll be a real speech with perhaps some real substance.