The obligatory SOTU post

For starters, I didn't watch it.

My band had a rehearsal for an upcoming gig, and we needed to nail down our set list. (Which we did. We're going to tear the place up.)

After perusing numerous takes, my sense is that Red State's Joe Cunningham's two-speeches formulation is about right:

Did you catch it? Did you watch or listen as President Donald Trump gave two speeches before Congress?

The first part of the speech was the positives. Essentially, “This is what we have done!” It was a roll call of the GOP’s accomplishments during Trump’s first year – including tax reform, getting rid of the individual mandate, and others. He referenced the hurricane-ravaged parts of the U.S. and Puerto Rico and mentioned both professional and civilian efforts to help affected citizens.

In this part of the speech, he was speaking to all Americans. “This is what I did for you,” he told us. “This is what I got accomplished.”

It was also a nod to his early talk of working with Democrats and negotiating. He mentioned several things Democrats want – paid family leave, more infrastructure spending, etc. – and it was meant to show the American public that Trump does have a heart and care about them.

Then, things changed a bit. If you were watching ABC, you saw the list of topics in the speech as Trump went through them. The first part of Trump’s speech ended on the topic of child care. The second part began with immigration.

It was clear what had happened. That was the part of the speech that Stephen Miller took over in writing.

The more hawkish side of the speech focused on the issues that got Trump elected, and how he intended to keep those promises. He received some “Boos” from the crowd, but he wasn’t speaking to Congress at that point. He was speaking to the base that elected him.

That much narrower audience came at a price. The wide audience is not necessarily into Trump’s promises on immigration reform (as they perceive it). They don’t necessarily want to hear more talk of war and the military. They want to see how Trump will heal America. And that is ultimately something that Trump didn’t quite address in the speech. 

I checked my Twitter feed when I got home from practice to get a sense of the immediate-aftermath  round of takes. Someone - I think maybe John Podhoretz - said that the emphasis on the hard-core criminal element in the illegal-alien population came across as a little gratuitous. Jose Miguel Cruz, director of research at the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University says at the Washington Post that the MS-13 presence in the US is statistically dwarfed by homegrown gangs like the Crips and Bloods. Then again, that's small comfort to people like Elizabeth Alvardo, Robert Mickens, Evelyn Rodriguez and Freddy Cuevas, parents of folks murdered by MS-13 monsters. 

The irony of Dems refusing to applaud for the great economic stats, including record-low minority unemployment, was striking, to say the least.

A word about how members of the Freedom-Hater Party dealt with the whole thing: Federal legislators often don't show up for the State of the Union. Is there ever 100 percent attendance? But they just don't show up. They don't use it as an opportunity to grandstand. Why did Maxine Waters have to get in front of a microphone to tell us what her plans weren't for the evening? And, yes, Luis Gutierrez's office has said he had to duck out for a meeting, but, given the identity-politics poison that regularly comes out of his mouth, including after the speech, are you buying it?

And several commentators have noted the choice of Joe Kennedy III to handle the official Dem response to the SOTU. I think Jim Geraghty at NRO has the most important perspective for us to take into consideration:

There’s a wide chasm between how Democrats perceive the Kennedys and the actual truth, and it’s not petty to keep pointing out that gap. There’s a stack of evidence showing that a lot of the Kennedys were horrible, selfish, abusive people who were somehow stage-managed and airbrushed into secular saints. The list of scandals runs generations, from lobotomizing Rosemary Kennedy, to JFK making Jackie get electroshock treatments, to the multiple allegations against William Kennedy Smith, to Patrick Kennedy driving under the influence. And of course, Chappaquiddick.

By Kennedy standards, Congressman Joe Kennedy III is an accomplished 37-year-old: Stanford and Harvard Law, two years in the Peace Corps, several years as an assistant district attorney. Defying his family stereotype, he doesn’t drink. But let’s not kid ourselves; if his name were Joe Smith and his family wasn’t an icon in American politics, he would have had a much tougher time winning a Democratic Congressional primary in Massachusetts at age 32.

That’s why there’s a good reason to cringe when Joe Kennedy III, grandson of Bobby Kennedy and great-nephew of John F. Kennedy and Ted Kennedy, stands before the nation giving the Democratic response to the State of the Union address and laments “a system forcefully rigged towards those at the top.” 

I've seen several takes on it that concluded with what we must all acknowledge: Trump will ruin the positive effect his speech had on how the public perceives him by indulging in petty, childish tweets about some perceived slight.

Which gets us to Ben Shapiro's excellent latest Townhall column, "Can A Flawed Man Be a Good President?" 

Shapiro makes the point that we recognize the contributions of great artists and athletes even as we take into account their egregious shortcomings as human beings. (I used to be bemused by a glaring incongruity I saw at a jazz-improvisation workshop I attended several years ago. Faculty used to pepper their instruction about scales and harmony with admonishments for us to stay away from dope and reckless living, even as they raved about particular Charlie Parker or Miles Davis solos.)

Can a bad man make a good president? The answer, obviously, should be yes.

What's more, the answer should have been obvious: Machiavelli suggested back in the 16th century that perhaps only a bad man can be a good politician. Machiavelli stated that virtue is an unrealistic and counterproductive standard for a statesman -- what is needed is virtu, a capacity to use virtue and vice for the achievement of a specific end. Even Aristotle, a devotee of virtue, suggested that good citizens need not be good men.

All of which makes sense. Bad men make great artists. Bad men make great athletes. Saints often die in penury; sinners often die in riches.

But the jury is still out on which is going to weigh more heavily in history's reckoning - Trump's accomplishments or, well, you know, his basic nature:

Trump's list of accomplishments is only half the story. That's because the office of the presidency is about more than mere accomplishments: It's about modeling particular behavior. Bill Clinton was a successful president, but he was not a good one: He drove the country apart, degraded our political discourse and brought dishonor to the White House. The same was true for President Richard Nixon. Doing good things as president does not mean being a good president. Being a good president requires a certain element of character.

And Trump's character is still lacking. Perhaps in the end, conservatives should ignore Trump's character defects and take the wins; I certainly cheer those wins. Perhaps in the end, Trump's character will poison the wins themselves; we won't know that for years. We do know, however, that if we believe the president has two roles -- one as a policymaker, the other as a moral model -- then President Trump can only be half-successful so long as he refuses to change himself.

Just came across this tweet from the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein that reminds us that, good bad or in-between, this speech was not the pronouncement of a conservative:

Trump SOTU: --Throws in towel on Obamacare repeal -- Wants to spend $1.5 trillion on infrastructure -- Paid family leave -- No entitlement reform

 Bottom line: State of the Union addresses can provide short-term national adrenaline rushes, but within a matter of days, we'll be talking about other stuff entirely.