President Obama came in for almost universal criticism after his State of the Union address last Tuesday: either the speech was "vague," "flat," "workmanlike but uninspired," or it "pandered to his base" while "pandering to the Tea Party movement" and yet drawing solely on the "failed Keynesianism" of the past century as it ignored our "real problems."
All of these things may be true. The criticism has become more biting in recent months; the president has largely outrun his benefit-of-the-doubt honeymoon with erstwhile supporters and a sympathetic press. But I have felt increasingly sad for this president in the past year, as our tribulations mount and it becomes increasingly clear that he is out of ideas. The growing sense that he represents a destructive way of thinking—a way that will diminish the quality of our American lives as the world destabilizes around us—is assuredly of electoral interest for 2012, but it is hardly an intellectual triumph.
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