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How Good Was Daniels’ Response?

Andrew was very unhappy with the State of the Union address, which helps to explain how he could write this about Daniels’ response: It was that rare event when the GOP response surpassed the actual State of the Union. I don’t think that it has ever happened that the opposition response has surpassed the main […]

Andrew was very unhappy with the State of the Union address, which helps to explain how he could write this about Daniels’ response:

It was that rare event when the GOP response surpassed the actual State of the Union.

I don’t think that it has ever happened that the opposition response has surpassed the main address. There is no way that it could. The opposition politician has perhaps a tenth the time that the President receives, his statement is limited to reacting against whatever the President said (or, in this case, didn’t say), and he enjoys none of the absurd pomp and theatrics that accompany the longer speech. I agree with James Joyner that these addresses are tiresome in the way that they treat a chief magistrate as if he were a monarch, but that’s also why no opposition speaker can ever outperform the President. Sometimes a very good response can be effective and memorable, as Jim Webb’s was in 2007, but it is difficult to separate assessments of the better performances from our agreement with what the speaker is saying. I remember thinking that Webb’s response was excellent, but that must have been shaped by my view that Webb had been right on the war in Iraq from the start, Bush had always been horribly wrong, and the 2006 midterms had just served as a massive rebuke to Bush. That brings us back to Daniels.

Was Daniels’ response really so impressive? I don’t think so, but it’s in the nature of these responses to make the speaker and his arguments seem smaller and less impressive than they are. For someone who wanted to hear Obama talk about entitlement reform and debt reduction, as Andrew clearly did, Daniels’ response was sure to satisfy, because that theme accounted for a large part of Daniels’ speech. There wasn’t much in Daniels’ response that I found objectionable, and I agree with him about the unsustainability of entitlements under the status quo as always. I didn’t like his claim that “the answers are purely practical,” because the details of any policy “answer” to the problem of public debt are always going to be defined by differing political principles and priorities. Perhaps I am not as impressed by this because I have read other Daniels’ speeches in which he makes much the same argument, so there was hardly anything new or unexpected in his remarks.

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