It's hard to remember a U.S. presidential address with more rhetorical dissonance. In his final State of the Union, President Barack Obama offered a hopeful vision of the future while also expressing little interest in achieving it over the next 12 months.
Obama began the speech by paying lip service to bipartisanship and ended it by lamenting the "rancor and suspicion" that dominates Washington, pleading with the country to "fix our politics." High notes, both.
But in between, he took a dismissive tone toward Republicans, belittling their objections to climate change, ridiculing opposition to scientific research, calling their criticisms of the economic recovery "fiction," and using business leaders as a pinata. As my colleague Francis Wilkinson wrote, "Virtually every paragraph was constructed as a contradiction of Republican dogma, Republican policy, Republican politics or Republican attitude." For a guy who says he wants to build trust across party lines, he sure has a funny way of going about it.
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