The College Fix

When Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight described President Obama’s State of the Union address as, “smart, safe, centrist, vague, and optimistic” on Twitter, I thought he might have been joking. All State of the Union speeches are smart, safe, centrist, vague, and optimistic.

Evidently the speech polled incredibly well according to CNN (with about a 92% approval rating), even though over at Fox News, Frank Luntz’s focus group tore it apart.  But what’s new?

I was struck but how similar it sounded to his post-partisan rhetoric when he was here in Iowa right before the caucuses—something I get a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot of, even if everything else fades into background noise.

In fact, the most memorable line from last night was his joke about salmon.  Personally, I was hoping he would get into specifics and acknowledge last week’s March of Life and then point out that gay couples don’t get abortions—bipartisanship anyone?  No?  Alrighty then.

But in fact, that’s kind of the point.  There wasn’t a whole lot of bipartisanship to be seen over the last two years—something Mr. Luntz’s focus group pointed out, citing it as why they didn’t believe Mr. Obama’s let’s-all-be-friends rhetoric.

The next two years will be different, though.  And it’s not because the Obama administration is doing a 180 on working with the GOP.  They didn’t really have an incentive to do so during the 111^th Congress because GOP demands for cooperation were absurd and Republicans were terrified of being buried in their primaries.

Today, however, the GOP controls the House by a significant margin.  If anything is going to be done over the next two years, it’s going to be the result of painful negotiations.  But if the lame duck session proves to be a good indicator, as painful as those negotiations are going to be, they will ultimately result in an effective, productive Congress.

…

Sorry.  Putting “productive” and “Congress” in the same sentence was really weird.

So, it makes sense that Obama is returning to his post-partisan rhetoric.  Like it or not—and rest assured that he doesn’t—he’s going to be getting friendly with Congressional GOP members.  Very friendly.

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