For me, this Bloomberg headline nicely sums up the problem with Obama’s final State of the Union speech:
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There was, of course, little that Obama could have done differently last night. No president is going to come out and say that the country is a mess, that his approval ratings have been underwater for years, and that he has been more successful at getting his own way than at convincing the public to come along with him. Nevertheless, it was a touch odd to watch Obama try his hand at the sort of shining final sermon that Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton gave. Those who take victory laps are supposed to have won. Obama has not won.
On one of the Weekly Standard’s podcasts, Stephen Hayes put the problem well. Obama’s address, Hayes said, can be summed up as “two-thirds of you want to go in a different direction with the next guy, but you’re wrong.”
Indeed.
This, naturally, is not how genuinely victorious people behave. Ronald Reagan did not explain in 1988 that American politics needed to be “fixed.” Why? Because he had mastered that politics. Nor, in 2000, did Bill Clinton need to cajole the public into seeing his tenure as a success. Obama, by contrast, is fighting to the last. Certainly, he has got a lot done. Certainly, he has changed the country — in my view, for the worse. But he has done so in a way that has left no room whatsoever for the sort of sunny recaps in which his more popular predecessors indulged. Lamenting this fact, Ezra Klein put it nicely: Obama, Klein says, has “won on policy, but lost on politics.” Will those policy victories be transient in consequence? Maybe.
A few years ago, Obama’s fans used to tell me that he was a success. Now, they hedge a little. “In the future,” they say, “Obama will be looked back on as a great president.” Perhaps they are right, and he will. Perhaps they are wrong, and he will not. Either way, he has quite definitely not got there yet. Last night’s attempt to fast-forward the tape did nothing to change that fact.
Obama's State of the Union -- Not Popular Enough for Optimism