Passive-aggressive President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech carefully hid his various anti-Republican insults and taunts under a sugary mass of niceness.
“A better politics is one where we appeal to each other’s basic decency instead of our basest fears,” he told his TV audience, subtly suggesting that his GOP opponents are motivated by base fears.
“A better politics is one where we debate without demonizing each other; where we talk issues, and values, and principles, and facts, rather than ‘gotcha’ moments, or trivial gaffes, or fake controversies that have nothing to do with people’s daily lives,” he said.
Message to Americans: The GOP leaders like to demonize and win cheap points in irrelevant shouting matches.
He broke character once, when he went off-script to openly boast to the new GOP majority that he had won two elections. “I have no more campaigns to run. I know because I won both of them,” he said.
Back in passive-aggressive mode, Obama suggested on national TV that Republicans want to deny African-Americans the right to vote, are uncaring about pregnant women, and are heartless toward illegal immigrants.
And he suggested that Republicans are cynical about America, even though the GOP owes much of its victory to the most influential popular and idealistic political movement since the 1960s — the small-government tea party.
“I know how tempting such cynicism may be,” he declared.
“But I still think the cynics are wrong. I still believe that we are one people. I still believe that together, we can do great things,” he said, in a typical, backhanded insult of the GOP.
Even his putative compliments — “A better politics is one where we debate without demonizing each other; where we talk issues, and values, and principles, and facts, rather than ‘gotcha’ moments” — suggest that Republicans are eager to demonize and eager to throw barbs at Democrats.
Throughout his speech, he said nothing about — and offered no compliments toward — the GOP’s small-government policies that were endorsed by American voters in the 2014 wave election that consigned his Democratic Party to minorities in the House and Senate, and in two-thirds of the nation’s 99 state legislatures.
Not a word passed his lips about the GOP’s albeit-inconsistent belief that Americans can manage their own lives, that entrepreneurs create new jobs, that force can kill overseas problems.
Instead, his speech was a stream of passive-aggressive jabs, penned by a proud president determined to ignore the public’s rejection of his trust-government ideology.
“Yes, passions still fly on immigration,” he said in a demeaning and brief reference to polls that show lopsided opposition to his immigration policies.
“But surely we can all see something of ourselves in the striving young student, and agree that no one benefits when a hardworking mom is taken from her child, and that it’s possible to shape a law that upholds our tradition as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants,” said Obama.
Translation: I’m a noble, caring guy, but you Republicans are a heartless bunch of un-American meanies.
And that smear came from a president who has minimized enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws and by dramatically offering work permits to at least five million illegal immigrants who will be allowed to compete for jobs also sought by Americans, even though the nation’s basic immigration law says foreigners can’t work without getting green cards.
But all those hidden jibes and taunts are simply another tactic for Obama, who turns the partisan invective on or off depending on his immediate needs.
Back in October 2013, as he was trying to rally the media against the GOP’s campaign to cut funding for Obamacare, he happily spewed out the invective.
“Having such a conversation, talks, negotiations [about Obamacare], shouldn’t require hanging the threats of a government shutdown or economic chaos over the heads of the American people,” he told the press.
“If you’re in negotiations around buying somebody’s house, you don’t get to say, ‘Well, let’s talk about the price I’m going to pay, and if you don’t give me the price then I’m going to burn down your house,'” he said in a 2013 press conference where he portrayed the GOP as nuclear-armed terrorists, blackmailers, arsonists, extortionists and crazies.