Now Herman Cain is speaking, because the Tea Party is so important they deserve an entirely separate response. But they're not important enough to rate someone better than Herman Cain.
7:53 PM PT: The coordinated GOP response seems to be that America is doing much worse than Obama is saying. Um, good luck with that, guys.
7:54 PM PT: On NBC, Mitt Romney agrees: the state of the union is much, much worse than Obama says. Apparently that's what they're going with: sheer economic terror.
7:55 PM PT: Well... that Cain speech was a lot of nothing. Sheesh.
7:56 PM PT: Mitt Romney looks frazzled. Seriously.
7:57 PM PT: So, I'm waiting here for the televised Occupy speech. Any idea what channel that's on?
8:01 PM PT: Yeah, um... I can't listen to Herman Cain anymore. Even the nostalgia is wearing off, so now he's just a jerk at a National Press Club podium. Bye, 999.
8:07 PM PT: So... short version. I thought this was a good speech by Obama, yes. The difficult question is whether any speech (or any behavior by Obama, period) can make any change in the behavior of the current Congress. I think the most obvious answer to that is 'no'. As we saw during the speech, even things that one might expect to garner perfectly bipartisan support (tax breaks for businesses that hire Americans? C'mon!) got a very partisan response. The GOP is so committed to their scorched-earth policy that I don't really see them dropping it at any point during the coming year.
8:09 PM PT: Having said that: I think the GOP is on dangerous ground if their whole message is "Obama isn't telling you the truth about how much America sucks right now." I'm hard pressed to come up with any election in which that was a winning strategy. I think it's just the only unified strategy the GOP is capable of coming up with, in their divided state.