The State of the Union

President Obama’s state of the Union Address I believe was another strong showing of his speaking ability. I feel how he opened the address was a wise decision because he got to show off one of his “accomplishments”, bringing the troops home from Iraq. No matter your opinion on this move Obama used it to applaud our troops and then linked it to two key issues. The economy and the bi-partisan politics that are two of the things Obama wanted to address in his presidency.

The strongest sound byte I heard was when Obama begins talking about our troops “They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.” This is great because he has the Republicans and Democrats clapping for our troops and then just slams home a point that we aren’t getting the job done here in Washington. The best was there was a pause between the clapping after he said this were everyone was thinking “crap we need to clap to that even though, we don’t want to.” He then backs this point with what America could be and then ties it to our past. The focus on the economy came from his focus on increasing manufacturing here at home, which I personal completely agree with him. The speech about what he did for the economy sounded great but, I wonder how it will fare in the general election because things are still not great.

What we can take away from this speech is that Obama’s campaign will be won on his ability to prove to the middle class that he was the one that stopped the decline of the economy, and has insured that the mistakes that caused it won’t happen again. The reason I say this is because the issues he point out are focused on the middle class. The thing I liked was Obama kept asking Congress to make bills and kept saying he would sign them. It makes it look like he is a man of action, but still things aren’t getting done. He has pointed out many of his accomplishment at every chance he has got the creating jobs, auto industry and overseas trade. Now Obama needs to fight an uphill battle to show that he has done these things.

The response I have gather from the people who watched the debate was Obama said a bunch of things that we wanted to hear but haven’t seen it done.  The feeling I got was best summed up by my friend Eric Kamer Facebook Status, “Sometimes I don’t understand the Government!! Maybe if they would actually do something instead of just talk about it we would not be where we are today.” I feel Eric is echoing the feeling a lot of us have that our government isn’t doing its job and that we voted for change in 2008. So where is it? Yes our economy isn’t tanking but in his speech he said we lost 8 million jobs but then says he is proud of the 3 million jobs created. I don’t know but the math doesn’t look good. I voted for Obama in 2008 and he is going to need to prove to me I made a good decision.