Columbus Dispatch...
Unstated  
January 27, 2012 

The big fact missing in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday was this one: 13 million Americans remain unemployed. About 10 million remain underemployed. 

That this fact was left out is no surprise. No president who has been in charge for three years and who hopes for re-election is going to draw attention to a failure of this magnitude. 

But the president is now well past the point in his term when he can expect to get any more mileage out of the excuse that he inherited a mess. First, he didn’t inherit it, he volunteered for it.   Second, he was hired to do something about it, and has failed. 

He tried on Tuesday to blame this on Republican obstinacy in Congress, but the fact is that for two of his three years in office, he had a Democratic majority in Congress and it passed his major jobs effort, the $787 billion stimulus plan. Not only that, but he has engaged in almost $4 billion in additional deficit spending. Despite all of this supercharged spending of borrowed money, 23 million Americans still face blighted job prospects. 

His other target is the wealthy, whom he hopes to scapegoat for the national fiscal problems he has aggravated so massively. Almost a third of the nation’s $15 trillion national debt has Obama’s name on it. He owns a similar share of the blame for the downgrade in the nation’s credit rating handed down last year by Standard & Poor’s.  

The president’s speech contained a number of claims and aspirations contradicted by his actions:

He once again called for an end to government subsidies for the oil industry and renewed support for alternative energy, ignoring entirely the fiasco of Solyndra, the solar-panel company that collapsed after receiving a $500 million federal loan championed   by the president. 

He touted his record as a slasher of costly and burdensome federal regulations, citing in particular the elimination of a rule that classed milk spills as oil spills. No doubt that was a good move, but game-changer for the economy? He also claimed that his administration has approved fewer new regulations than did the George W. Bush administration in a similar period. This is true. But more important is a fact-check by ABC News, incorporating a Bloomberg News study, which found that when it comes to regulations that cost the economy more than $100 million, Bush approved 90 compared with 129 by Obama.  

He promised to expand offshore oil drilling to increase energy production, while ignoring the fact that just last week, he nixed the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would have carried Canadian oil to U.S. refineries, a project that would have created thousands of U.S. jobs and would have reduced dependence on oil from unstable and hostile regimes such as those in Venezuela and the Middle East. 

 Finally, the president noticeably failed to boast about his biggest policy achievement, the enactment of a massive federal intrusion into health care. One might think that a president seeking re-election would trumpet such a triumph. But Obama and his advisers can read polls and know that in the nearly two years since it was passed, the vast majority of surveys consistently have shown that far more Americans oppose the law than support it.  

 Many people, including senior citizens, are deeply worried about the effect of the law on the cost, quality and availability of health care, and employer mandates and punishments contained in the law have inhibited some employers from expanding their businesses and hiring new workers. 

 Though the annual speech was intended to be a report on the state of the union, in fact it was the opening of the president’s re-election campaign. That’s why he dared not acknowledge the true state of the union. 

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