I guess this comes from living in another country, but I finally watched the 2012 State of the Union today, the enhanced version from YouTube and I have some of my own comments. Hopefully, I am not repeating things said by other pundits. First of all, I would like to say a good job to whoever made the graphs for the White House, I love the way that graphs can show your point of view and be misleading at the same time. I am sure the Republicans could take any of these graphs and rip them to shreds. The president’s policy on education really should be a hands-off approach. We need to give kids school choice, it will force schools who want to keep their kids to do better and offer more while forcing schools that don’t perform to close. It’s rough and capitalistic, but what it does is force competence. Before free public education students went to tutors, and the best tutors received the best fee. School choice doesn’t even mean public vs private school. Here in Bulgaria kids have the right to go to any high school they want, public, private, or special. These schools compete for these students and offer better programs because of it. Now I don’t know how this would work in a country that is much larger, but there has to be a way to do this. School choice is a way to keep the government out of our classroom and allow the best teachers to keep his/her job. His environmental plan seems spot-on for the future, allowing for job creation, and for an increase in clean energy. Everything from college tuition to energy policy focused on job creation, which makes sense. This is not a time in our nation’s history where people are looking for a high-minded policy. The average American is looking for relief and a job. And the president’s push for insourcing is a great one, although his use of tax terminology was a bit misleading. I find this year’s State of the Union to have many great ideas that I hope will be looked at, although I fear, as Obama said himself, that nothing will get done due to election politics.
