Obama Swerves Back to the Center
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Feb. 13 (Bloomberg) -- “Two acts in the same play.”According to White House spokesman Jay Carney, that’s howPresident Barack Obama sees the inaugural address he deliveredon Jan. 21 and last night’s State of the Union. If you ask me,they were two different plays -- and since I didn’t much likethe first, I was glad the second was a new work.
The two events have different purposes, of course. Theinaugural is a celebration of democracy. It calls for vision,inspiration, a sense of history and a measure of grandiosity.For Obama, those things are like falling off a log. The State ofthe Union should be more plodding -- a plainer statement of howthe vision will be advanced. That’s less the president’s thing.