I watched President Obama's State of the Union address last night. He was, as always, a gifted orator and communicator.

But I believe he remains naively optimistic that he can woo obstructionist Republicans into cooperation on his major programs by invoking a warm and fuzzy sense of kumbaya bipartisanship in the name of what is best of the American people. That will never occur.



Most of Obama's address was devoted to a new, and I thought excessive, appeal to fiscal conservatism--one born, no doubt, of the recent election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

Obama promised a three-year fiscal freeze in federal budgets beginning in 2011 (military spending exempted, of course) and expanded tax credits for middle class parents with enough income to send children to college in the first place. He also trotted out various job creation schemes with an emphasis on the importance of the "private sector" in job creation always.

He also assented to a number of Republican talking point issues such as offshore drilling, new nuclear power plants, and that monumental oxymoron of our time, "clean coal technology".

Obama soft peddled the health care issue during his address, not mentioning it for the first 30 minutes of his 70-minute speech and then only in general terms. He made no demands of Republicans. He threatened no passage of health care by reconciliation in the face of continued Republican opposition. He only begged them to cooperate in passing some kind of health care reform because of the crying needs of the American people.

That approach will not sway Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Jim DeMint. Those politicians and their Republican colleagues are bent on destroying Obama and his legislative agenda. DeMint indicated as much in a recent interview. I doubt they and their constituents were moved by Obama's silver tongued oratory.

I heard nothing to cause me to believe life will become any less stressful for one such as myself who must live on $12,000 annually--one who has had no dental insurance for 20 plus years and is about to lose all of his teeth because Medicare pays for one set of dentures in a retiree's lifetime and for no other dental work--one who is expected to pay 20 percent of the cost of any medical procedure, however expensive, or be referred to a medical collection agency.

No, Barrack Obama is definitely not a socialist or a champion of those living in poverty in this nation. He cannot identify with poverty and lack. He is a patrician elitist--a centrist Democratic politician who is crab crawling to the right as fast as possible because of apparent political trends in this nation of unthinking knee jerk reactive fools.



I wish to live in a socialist society or a social democracy, at the very least. I want to live where I would receive dental and medical care because I am a human being and deserving of it--not because I am financially able to augment my Medicare with private supplemental dental, ocular, and medical insurance policies.

I want socialism, plain and simple--not Barack Obama's watered down centrist version of corporatized capitalism which is the best the Democratic Party of this nation dares to hope for or strives to achieve.

Should I vote here again, I will not be voting for a Democrat or a Republican. The similarities of the aims, goals, and platforms of these major U.S. political parties far outweigh their largely cosmetic differences.

We need a third party in America--a party devoted to the welfare of the people rather than to Fortune 500 corporations and their shareholders.

Barack Obama is a major disappointment for me.