Heritage Foundation Takes Apart Obama’s Class Warfare State Of The Union Speech
Jan 25th, 2012 | By fyork | Category: News Flashes
The Heritage Foundation provided a good analysis of President Obama’s lame State of the Union speech from Tuesday night.
The speech, which the GOP points out in a clever video, is simply a rehash of previous SOTU speeches he’s already given. They all call for the usual: Tax hikes on the “rich”; misinformation; new government jobs programs; more government spending; more class warfare talk; and the usual tactic of blaming Republicans for whatever goes wrong in Washington, D.C. The Marxist-Saul Alinsky rhetoric is really tiresome.
Heritage points out that Obama’s proposal for a new jobs training program is old news. There are already 47 job training programs being operated by the federal government and there is little evidence any of them are effective.
In addition, Obama’s own policies are responsible for the slow economic growth in our country.
And, on energy policy, Obama omitted discussions of two important issues: Keystone XL pipeline and the Solyndra scandal. As Heritage notes:
President Obama omitted two words from his State of the Union speech, but there’s two words that speak volumes about the president’s direction for America’s energy policy. Keystone and Solyndra.
Oil and Gas Production
With respect to oil and gas production, President Obama ignores the bad administrative decisions and takes credit where credit’s not due. He chose not to mention his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline that would have created jobs immediately and brought much needed oil from Canada to Gulf refineries – all with minimal environmental risk. Despite broad support for the pipeline, the President catered to special interests and rejected the permit.
Of course, he completely ignores the importance of nuclear energy as a reliable source of power for the future. Heritage notes:
The President insists that he wants to build an economy using American energy resources to create American jobs. Nuclear energy might be a good place to start. America would need approximately 50 new plants over the next 30 years just to maintain the percentage of our electricity that is currently produced by nuclear power. Each of these plants requires around 2400 workers to build and then another 700 are required to operate each plant. Then there are all the workers needed to manufacture the plant components, to produce the fuel, and to manage the waste.
The President, at least rhetorically, understands the potential of nuclear energy. It creates jobs and produces the clean, domestic energy that he claims to want.
Heritage analyst Hans von Spakovsky notes that Obama misunderstands the concept of fundamental rights under our Constitution. He writes:
President Obama showed once again that he does not understand the First Amendment or understand his obligation as the executive to help protect the rights of Americans to engage in political activity and political speech, as well as to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” i.e., lobby the government. In his state of the union speech, Obama proposed that “people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress” should be barred from lobbying Congress and vice versa. This would be a restriction of fundamental political rights that could not be implemented by Congress without a constitutional amendment. It is shameful that the President, who swears an oath to defend the Constitution, has chosen to attack First Amendment rights for a second consecutive State of the Union address.
Read the complete Heritage Analysis.
Watch Rep. Eric Cantor’s reaction to Obama’s speech on Fox News.
Watch the GOP video comparing Obama’s previous canned SOTU speeches.

