Two quick thoughts on the State of the Union

As if we haven’t talked enough about the Citizens United Supreme Court case around these parts (recap: I find objections to the ruling unfathomable; David at least sees how some could be upset; I agreed with Glenn Greenwald for the first and probably last time on a matter of con law; David thinks the sky-is-falling routine from the left is silly), I do want to quickly point out that the president — a former constitutional law scholar, mind you — was flat-out wrong when he said the court had overturned decades of jurisprudence on the matter and opened the floodgates of evil, foreign money into our pure, pristine elections. Bradley Smith, law professor, writes that “This is either blithering ignorance of the law, or demogoguery of the worst kind.” I’ll let you decide which it was.

Secondly, as the WaPo editorial writers, Matt Continetti and Jennifer Rubin all noted, the speech seemed less like one given by a head of state than one given by a man on the campaign trail throwing out promises like mardi gras beads in the hopes of whipping up excitement about his candidacy. I don’t see why this is terribly surprising: Obama has never had to govern anything. His singular achievements have all been about getting himself elected. The man’s been in constant campaign mode for almost seven years now.

Again, I’m forced to revisit the worst electoral prediction I have ever made. I thought choosing Sarah Palin for the vice presidency was a stroke of genius for this simple reason: If anyone attacked her for being unqualified, all you’d have to do is turn it right back around on Obama. “Oh, a one term governor is unqualified to be the vice president of the United States, but a one term senator whose sole qualification for the presidency is giving some nice speeches and getting elected to a safe Democratic seat is eminently qualified? Really?” I still don’t quite understand how that gambit didn’t work. I get the feeling that McCain was too nice to really go for the jugular — or was afraid of being accused of saying that Barack Obama was uppity, or some such. That campaign spent most of the time walking on eggshells around any issues related to his competency for fear of being labeled racist.

Ah well. But hey, at least we still have the campaigner-in-chief to get us out of this mess, am I right?