President Obama delivers the annual State of the Union message tonight, an address you can hear live at KFBK. If you’re watching it on television you will see one part of the audience: the Democrats repeatedly standing to cheer their president - while the other half, the Republican section, will probably stay seated for most of the speech, the stone face routine interrupted here and there by some polite applause.
There are a number of ways to measure the State of the Union. Use enough statistics and you can make pretty much any argument you want. Today I’m not really making any argument. I have my opinion about the President and about the state of the union. You may have yours. But let’s try to be very fair. I’ll give you some facts and figures and you draw your own conclusions about whether America is going in the right direction and whether Barack Obama is the right guy to lead it. In case you’re curious, these numbers are drawn from a number of sources, including factcheck.org, the Huffington Post, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In fact none of my figures come from any conservative or anti Obama website or publication.
Let’s start with unemployment; it’s been a roller coaster under Obama but it was 7.8% when he took office and it is 7.8% now. It did go into double digits for a while, hitting an all term high of ____but the net effect is a plus in job creation, plus 325,000. Curiously, those jobs may not be paying well or there are still too many people who need them because the poverty rate under Obama has jumped by 6.4 million and nearly 50% more Americans are on the food stamp rolls, since January of 2009, as he wound down the conflict in Iraq and put a time table for bringing out troops home from Afghanistan, 1,700 Americans died in those two nations as did our ambassador Christopher Stevens and 3 others on a bloody September 11th in Benghazi. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of national unity these days, and if the November numbers are accurate, close to 50% of Americans would have preferred Mitt Romney or someone else in the white house for the next 4 years...
Consumer confidence, which bottomed in 2008, has gradually risen and is actually 86%.
