Frum: The SOTU Obama Will Never Give

Written by David Frum on Friday January 21, 2011

What should President Obama say for his State of the Union speech?

In the latest issue of Esquire magazine, I give my suggestions for what President Obama should say at his State of the Union address next Tuesday:

It's a weird feeling of gender bending to imagine writing a major speech for a president of a different party. It's tempting to treat the whole exercise as a joke: "First of all, I'd like to express my apologies to Prime Minister Netanyahu for treating him so rudely." Or — worse — you insert into the president's mouth words that he'd never say, and the whole thing degenerates into political wish fulfillment.

Yet there can be a real purpose in the exercise. After the Democratic defeat of November 1994, President Clinton telephoned the neoconservative Democrat Ben Wattenberg and wondered aloud how he'd ended up the manager of the government, and not the leader of the country. That one question propelled President Clinton's return to the political center. A supporter may have better insight into what an embattled president would wish to say. An opponent can offer better perspective on what such a president needs to say.

So here's one conservative Republican's attempt to imagine what a liberal Democratic president should say if he wished in his next State of the Union to speak to the whole nation, adversaries as well as supporters, independents as well as partisans:

Click here to read the rest.

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