Now that I’ve had a little more time to think about the SOTU address, I’d like to revise my final comments from the State of the Union blog.
While I wasn’t able to write about the Democratic rebuttal, I did see it. Both Pelosi and Daschle gave lackluster performances, but my memory recalls that this has been the case for every rebuttal in past years, regardless of which party gave the final remarks. Both President Bush and President Clinton benefited from the heartfelt support their party members lent; they and delivered passionate speeches in part because the crowd’s palpable energy made it possible. In contrast, the rebuttal speakers must stand alone in front of a noncommittal camera. This is not to suggest that the Dem's couldn't have offered a better response -- they could have. However, one should never be able to compare the two and suggest that the different circumstances didn’t have some effect. For SOTU addresses, presidents have good reason to be enthusiastic. For SOTU rebuttals, the minority party probably senses that half the audience has changed the channel.
So, on to the SOTU itself. As my comments undoubtedly suggested, I was not impressed. The speech felt lackluster to me, a plethora of vagaries about creating jobs and returning taxes which offered no tangible solutions or concrete evidence to support the proposals. Some parts of it felt entirely inappropriate -- don't we have more important things to do for our youth than cracking down on pill-popping athletes? That time could have been better spent by addressing the real problems that create troubled youth: an empty plate for breakfast, a crime-ridden neighborhood to walk through on the way to school, hard-working parents who don’t have the chance to see their kids before bedtime.
I think that’s why the SOTU frustrated me most. None of the proposals address the tangled roots of our domestic problems. All of Bush’s speeches seem to prevent things in terms of good-bad, right-wrong, yes-no. But it’s not that simple, and it worries me that the leader of our country appears to have such a naïve view of the way the world works. No Child Left Behind cannot bring children up to an equal academic plane so long as some kids don’t even have the money to buy calculators. As a stand alone piece of legislation, it won’t help schools with 20 year-old textbooks, or remedy the high dropout rates in rural districts like my own. Kids left my school because they had to work to support their families, not because bad teachers ruined their scholastic experiences. NCLB is a misguided Utopian attempt to deal with a school system that is struggling beneath the weight of multitudinous socio-economic and political problems. How can we hold teachers accountable for students who can’t concentrate because they didn’t eat breakfast?
I could go on for a long time, but my general thoughts remain the same. The world operates within shades of gray, not in the perfectly separated worlds of good and bad. Bush’s proposals are dangerously naïve to me. If we lived in a perfect world, they might work. But we don’t, and I fear our president doesn’t understand what that means.
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