George Will on State of the Union: 'There Was A Lot Of Gesture Liberalism'

George Will on State of the Union: 'There Was A Lot Of Gesture Liberalism'

Washington Post columnist George Will suggested President Barack Obama’s was just going through the motions in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night and that the speech was devoid any substantive “red meat” for his liberal base.

Transcript as follows:

WILL: It was an agreeably harmless talk, really, in a sense, that there were no big ideas. There were the chestnuts to which Charles refers, a lot of gesture liberalism. Things people like, like minimum wage and all that won’t really change America in any meaningful way. There was an absence of what we were told to look for, which was red meat for the carnivorousness left in his own party that really wants some more excitement. I didn’t hear any of that. And when he talks about what he can do with his pen. I’m not hearing that. Anything he does by executive order, and there were precious few intimations as to what those would be, will be written on water, because any order can, by definition, be undone by an order from the next executive.

On one subject, for example, he said as he usually does say, that too few people are going to college and colleges are too expensive. In fact, his own government recently announced that 44 percent of the recent college graduates who have jobs are in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and he’s said that the 28-percent price increase in the cost of universities, under his administration because as the federal government subsidizes higher education, the universities and colleges raise their prices to capture the subsidies.

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