Cal Thomas - Performance politics

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, March 3rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Here’s commentator Cal Thomas on the state of the State of the Union address.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: President Biden’s poll numbers are tanking. Badly. The most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll gave him an approval rating of just 37 percent. He needed to do something spectacular, even radical, with Tuesday’s State of the Union speech to keep those numbers from sinking further. Unfortunately for Biden and his party, he did nothing likely to stem his free fall.

The opening part about Ukraine sounded tacked-on to a speech that had already been written. The words sounded good: freedom over tyranny was one good line. And the threat to go after Russian oligarchs may have appealed to that other war Democrats love to fight—that would be class warfare. But words are not the kind of weapons Ukraine needs right now. Closing U.S. airspace to Russian flights is symbolic. Closing airspace over Ukraine would be substantive. But no one wants a confrontation with a nuclear armed Russia and a Vladimir Putin who appears to some to be increasingly unstable.

President Biden said he had an agreement with allied countries to release 16 million barrels of oil. He claimed that would help drive down gas prices. He said nothing about the oil the United States still buys from Russia, enabling it to underwrite the cost of tyranny against Ukraine.

The rest of the speech was pretty much boilerplate Democrat talking points we’ve heard for years, including the familiar charge that corporations and “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share in taxes.” Why is it that Democrats never tell us what that means? The Federal government takes in record amounts of revenue. It’s spending that drives debt. The president claimed he will cut the deficit in half. Not the debt, mind you. But that is hard to believe in light of his new spending proposals.

Perhaps the most laughable part of the speech was his promise to “secure the border.” Rather than finish building the wall, he wants to spend more on “technology” and give “citizenship to dreamers.” How does that stem the tsunami of migrants who have been entering the country by the tens of thousands? Rewarding people who broke the law to get here only encourages more to come. It also makes a mockery of immigration and other laws the president took an oath to enforce.

The president also threw in a proposal to spend more on cancer research, “fund the police, not defund the police,” and reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Weren’t we told Obamacare would do that? Why are these problems never solved? Because they are not the business of government. If government could fix these problems, wouldn’t they be fixed by now, given all the rhetoric and spending?

These State of the Union addresses would be much shorter if Members of Congress had to remain seated. I counted 58 standing ovations, most from Democrats. The public might be better served and less bored if presidents adopted the pre-television era policy of sending their thoughts on the state of the union to Congress in writing.

Unfortunately, that’s as likely to happen as politicians balancing the budget.

I’m Cal Thomas.

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