By 
It was President Barack Obama's best-delivered State of the Union address since 2008 -- but it was all a charade, a deception, a con job and a planned-in-advance strategy that put his nemesis, the Grand Old Party, in a box.In a box because most of the President's 18 items on his wish list were meant to show an estimated 40 million television viewers that the Republican Party now has to put up or shut up for good.
The Republicans now have to come back, in the next two years of Obama's second term as President, and say they have been working on these same 18 proposals all along.
But that rebuttal won't wash with the American public. Won't wash because despite the President's claim that the economy has now rebounded from the 2007 Recession, has an improved unemployment rate under 5 percent and is the strongest in the world, an estimated 50 million Americans are still struggling to make ends meet with annual combined family salaries of $15,000 or less.
Those aren't my figures. They come from the President himself. He noted it in his Tuesday, Jan. 20 State of the Union speech. That's roughly $288 per week for a family of four.
"How many of you today can live on earnings like that?" he asked.
Obama's one-hour speech is forcing the GOP to shoot back with promises that when they own the White House after the 2016 Presidential Election, the country will once again be on a level playing field for both rich and poor.
But the Republicans are only hallucinating. They aren't going to be anywhere near 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW after the final 2016 election votes are counted.
Sitting in the Oval Office in that historic building will be Hillary Rodham Clinton, at 68, the first woman President in U.S. history.
But now hear this, for you are hearing it here for the first time after all the Talking TV Heads on Tuesday finished their last gin-and-tonics and shuffled off to dreamland.
What you are hearing now is that behind, way behind the scripting of Obama's State of the Union speech was the clever and devious political-maneuvering hand of William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton, the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001.
Clinton, of course, is also the husband of Hillary Clinton.
According to usually creditable sources familiar to this columnist, Clinton influenced Obama's speech writers to craft the State of the Union remarks so that they would specifically goad the GOP into surging on the offensive with plans to improve the country's health, almost the way Obama outlined it.
But the Clinton-Obama strategy was even more than that. All of Obama's wish list was meant as a starting point for his Democratic Party to plan in-depth debates with their Republican opponents as the Presidential Race begins to heat up this year and accelerates by the first of 2016.
Obama and his team know full well the President's wish list has as much chance of becoming law within the next two years as Russia's Vladimir Putin has of introducing Democratic rule in his country.
It just isn't going to happen because the GOP owns both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives and will block all Obama proposals, no matter how beneficial they may appear to be for the American public.
But to give the Republicans a measure of credit for their obstinacy in balking at any of the President's wish list, it must be reported that Obama had a golden chance to work in many of his wishes during his first two years in office, from 2008 to 2010.
That's when the Democrats controlled both the Senate and the House, as the Republicans do now.
But Obama was blocked from doing so because of several individuals in his administration whose political campaigns were funded for years by Wall Street - the same institution that has always wanted to keep all corporate taxes as low as possible and have federal regulation of the finance and banking industries kept to a minimum.
Those administration officials later resigned voluntarily to take other prominent jobs in both the public and private sectors.
Although as an orator, Obama is no Martin Luther King Jr. or even a Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the President's speech delivery Tuesday, stilted as it always is, did hone in on crucial issues confronting America.
They included:
- Paid sick and maternity leave from employers.
- Expand the child-care tax credit to $3,000 per child under age 5.
- Higher hourly wages.
- Increase the earned income tax credit to workers without children and to non-custodial parents.
- Equal pay for women doing the same work as men.
- Stronger unions.
- Free two-year tuition at Community Colleges. (Cost: $60 billion)
- Better and faster job opportunities for war veterans.
- Faster and cheaper broadband Internet for everybody.
- Close IRS tax loopholes that allow the rich to pay less taxes than working Americans.
- Increase capital gains tax to 28 percent from 23.8 percent for individuals making $500,000 or more.
- Eliminate a tax break on inheritances.
- Impose a fee on financial firms with assets of at least $50 billion.
- A $175 billion tax cut for the so-called Middle Class.
- Close the U.S. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba.
- End the U.S. embargo all goods to Cuba.
Money always has been at the core of all American politics and it's no different today as it was in President George Washington's time.
Stay tuned as the political oratorical volume heats up in the coming months.
