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I'd have to sum up my immediate reaction to tonight's State Of The Union speech with the old Monty Python line: ".... and now, for something completely different ..."
Well, it's that time of year again. The time of year when pundits across the land helpfully (oh, so helpfully) offer the president advice on what he should say in his "State Of The Union" speech tomorrow. While I've engaged in this sort of thing before, this year I'd like to make predictions of what President Obama will say tomorrow night (as opposed to what I would like him to say). Which means I'm not endorsing any of this personally, merely attempting to predict what will be in tomorrow night's speech in advance.
With some regularity, this column excoriates the mainstream news media for all sorts of continued idiocy in the way it conducts its business. But every once in a while, we have to applaud them when they get something right. This week, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post deserves mentioning, for pledging to stay Palin-free for the month of February. Details on this in a moment.
The House of Representatives, as expected, just voted to repeal the landmark healthcare law which President Obama signed less than a year ago. This vote was a symbolic victory for Republicans, but not any sort of substantial change. To truly repeal the law, the Senate would have to also pass the bill the House just passed, and then both houses would have to muster a two-thirds majority vote to overcome Obama's veto. None of which is going to happen. Democrats still control the Senate, and Harry Reid has all but pronounced the bill "dead on arrival" in his chamber, meaning that today's House vote is the only victory (and a symbolic one, at that) Republicans should expect in their mad dash to repeal healthcare reform.
Senator Joe Lieberman will announce tomorrow (from all reports) that he will not be seeking another term in the Senate. Democrats across the land are collectively heaving a large sigh of relief at the news. "So long, Joe," seems to be the prevailing sentiment, although if you listen closely you can hear the muttered "... don't let the door hit you on the way out," or other less-than-endearing sentiments.
Both of these urges run deep. It's part of the human condition to try to fit things into a rational framework in our minds, and to reassure ourselves that if we only had done things a little differently, we could have avoided this tragedy. The problem is, neither one of these is any sort of universal truth. Sometimes craziness happens for no reason other than mental imbalance, and sometimes it happens explosively with little warning.
Sometimes it is hard to come up with a metaphor to describe the week that was. This was not one of those weeks.
Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!
President Barack Obama gave an afternoon press conference today, and he sounded a lot more confident than he has sounded for quite a while. The reason for this is that the 111th Congress is ending with a bang, and not the expected whimper. After the Democrats' "shellacking" (to use Obama's preferred term) in the midterm elections, few inside-the-Beltway prognosticators figured much of anything would get done in the lame duck session of Congress before the newly-elected Congress is seated in January. As it turned out, this conventional wisdom was wrong. The lame duck Congress produced more weighty legislation than most lame ducks manage -- a fitting end to two years with more significant legislative victories than any Congress since Lyndon B. Johnson (or even Franklin D. Roosevelt, depending on how you score these things). Which is why President Obama had good reason to sound as confident as he did today.
Both houses of Congress have now passed the bill which repeals the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy (DADT), which did not allow gay Americans to openly serve their country in military uniform. President Obama has scheduled a signing ceremony for the repeal bill this Wednesday. While this is a significant achievement on the civil rights/gay rights front, it is also a significant political achievement. And one man stands out as the driving political force behind the successful effort to repeal this discriminatory federal policy. Which is why, today, I'd like to publicly thank Senator Joe Lieberman.