My Takeaways (from Obama's non-State of the Union)

There are a few things I think are important to take away from Obama's speech last night. I think he did a good job, and was generally pleased with what I heard. I wanted to extricate a couple of points from the rhetoric and applause breaks as being particularly poignant.

1) Obama clearly stated that a cause of our economic problems was the placement of short-term rewards over long-term prosperity. I think even he doesn't know how right he is. This is an important distinction not because recognition will fix things, but because it means they're looking at things the right way when it comes to patching up the system and putting in place safeguards to ward off similar types of market failures, market crashes, and economic implosions (and a bit of market psychology may also come into play, as the mere feeling that our leadership is doing things right will restore confidence needed to bolster credit markets and investment).

2) Obama made a great point with his already much-quoted insistence that dropping out of school isn't just quitting on yourself, but quitting on the country. He followed it up by saying America needs all of its human resources working to as close to their potential as we can get them, and he's right. Combine that with other parts of his speech in which he implored Americans to invest in themselves through college or trade school or apprenticeships or graduate school, plus the part in which he insisted that research, invention, innovation and discovery will help lead us out of our economic hardship, and we have the beginning of a clear vision, a realistic look at ourselves and what we need to do. I think he couldn't be more right, and his challenge to restore America's place as having the highest proportion of college gruadates by 2020 attests to his long-term thinking, which is exactly what we need (note that 2020 is even after his second term would end, a horizon to which not many politicians often look).

3) Healthcare, energy, and education. These were his three priorities, and they should be three of the five places we invest our public money (the other two being resurrecting our financial services industry and investing in scientific research, discovery and innovation--at least that's the PiFry Plan). We can get better healthcare for less money; most other industrialized nations get similar healthcare for less money, and we have better resources to work with here. We can lead the world again in green energy technology, and we should. Green technology is going to revolutionize the way we generate, transport, and even use electricity, and it will likely open the doors to all sorts of new frontiers we can't even imagine now. China and Denmark shouldn't be given global leadership by our complacence, and there's huge returns on investment to be had. Education can be silver bullet, and it's the way we bring up a workforce able to compete in a globalized economy, able to hold the jobs we create in healthcare and green energy, able to invent the next solar panel, the next iPod, the next microprocessor, start the next Google or Intel or Microsoft. Obama, being as clear and correct as a president ever was, pointed out that those who out-teach today will out-compete tomorrow.

And finally, I'd just like to laugh about one more thing. That thing being how Bobby shot himself in the political foot afterwards by failing to adequately deliver a largely well-written speech, and also by invoking the federal government's disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina as a reason to espouse Republican philosophies (touting how well leaving people to fend for themselves in a disaster works...I guess there wasn't THAT much looting, so who needs a stimulus package).