I watched the State of the Union speech last evening. As one blogger said, it was really two speeches: the domestic speech, followed by the foreign policy speech. The foreign policy speech was right on target, even if it wasn't what most listeners wanted to hear.
The domestic speech was an odd mixture of same old-same old and odd new ideas. Unfortunately, it is likely that the only part of it that has much chance of being enacted is the immigration part. The President's views on illegal immigration are much closer to those of the Democrats than to the views of his own party.
His ideas about tax breaks for health insurance and a civilian reserve corps were both so poorly explained that it is difficult to know exactly what he intended. Neither sounded like something a self-respecting Republican would propose.
If this President doesn't figure out how to turn our Iraq involvement into a success, I fear he will be grouped by historians with Jimmah Carter and Herbert Hoover as one of our failed Presidents.
