The Republican Response to the President’s State of the Union Address wasn’t actually a response to him at all. It was more of a response to what Republicans delude themselves into believing who President Barack Obama is, no different than Clint Eastwood talking to an empty chair and pretending a severely inaccurate and misrepresented imaginary President Obama is seated in it.
Senator Marco Rubio spoke about the President’s so called “obsession” with raising taxes, right after his address which listed new policies and programs that are already paid for. Rubio criticized the President for not putting a plan forward dealing with Medicare, even going so far to say tonight would have been a good night. Mind you this is right after the President proposed a plan dealing with Medicare minutes earlier. The Senator from Florida spoke about how the President loves big government right after President Obama said we don’t need a bigger government “but a smarter government that sets priorities and invests in broad-based growth“.
Extremely conservative Republicans ate up Senator Rubio’s response, putting aside the whole “watergate” issue, because it catered to their warped caricature of how they view President Obama, even though just ten minutes earlier the President’s own speech spoke very much to the contrary of that image.
I mean, I’ll give the Republican rebuttal a slight break. I realize they write these responses having no idea what the President will actually say in the actual State of the Union Address, but come on. Why write a response that so heavily assumes what the President would say? Why put yourself in a position where virtually every accusation you make of what the President was talking about is just about the opposite of what he actually stated?
I don’t think the Republican Party will be winning any new hearts and minds by ignoring the reality of who President Obama is and what he wants to do and being so patronizing to Americans by expecting a majority of them to ignore reality as well.
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