President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address was a little surprising, but not in a particularly interesting way, according to Washington Post columnist and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer.
On Fox News Channel’s coverage of Obama’s Tuesday evening speech, Krauthammer said the highlights were its lack of partisanship and how it wasn’t quite as platitudinous as it might have been before he was sworn in as president.
“It was less partisan than I would have expected,” Krauthammer said. “Far less than the speech in Kansas on economic inequality and infinitely less than the speech he gave last April where he attacked the Republicans’ plan for reforming Medicare. He tried to act statesman-like. He tried to be bipartisan.”
Krauthammer said there were few bold initiatives proposed in the speech, and that the ones Obama did mention were small in the grand scheme.
“The other aspect of that I thought was really interesting in how the narrowness of the vision that Obama has presented compared with what it was four years ago,” he noted. “When he was candidate of hope and change, he was a man that would heal the earth and prevent the oceans from rising. He was a man six weeks after his inauguration where he pledged to change fundamentally American education, energy and health care. And here he is in a speech that was instance after instance of a tweak in tax code here, a program here, a new department or committee here that had a lot of aspect of the late Clinton administration.”
But there was one area where Krauthammer detected some emotion: Obama’s desire to raise taxes on the rich.
“The one area where he spoke forcefully and I think dramatically was on raising the taxes on the rich,” Krauthammer said. “That was sort of the only strong aspect of the speech, but in it of itself is just a repeat of the decade of debate over the Bush tax cuts and another proposal that looked as if it was a new alternative to the minimum tax on millionaires.”