President Obama entered office promising to be a different kind of politician - one who would speak honestly with the American people about the hard choices they face and would help make those hard calls. Tuesday night's State of the Union Address would have been the moment to make good on that promise. He disappointed.
Ouch! When friends go public with concerns about you, you've got a problem.
I just finished reading the SOTU (link above in WaPo quote) and my reaction was that it was too long, tediously so. Like any committee-crafted speech it wasn't bad but it tried to cover too much and, in the process, tired the listener or, in my case, the reader.
The public cares about the economy and jobs and he ended up talking about many, many other things. I'm sure he believes those "other things" are related to the nation's economic health. However it sounded like he was talking about them because they were, in themselves, important. In other words, it sounds like he doesn't "get" what people care about and is off on his own tangent, as he was with health care.
