As President Barack Obama stood in front of the podium giving his State of the Union last Wednesday, I was oddly reminded of a typical Senator Barack Obama campaign speech. It seems that, contrary to President Obama’s belief that not every day in Washington should be an election day, his sentiments and approach to public speaking have not changed much at all since his presidency began about a year ago.

The content of his speech has not progressed much and I’m not quite sure that Obama has received the notice that the election is over and that he now needs to discuss actual policies rather than just continuing to make promises that he will not be able to keep.

Of course, as most people do, he decided to prop himself up by tearing someone else down. In this case, the natural target of his criticisms was President George W. Bush. Throughout the speech there appeared jab after jab at this President who has yet to be judged by history. Every single deficiency that entered the President’s mind and any doubt that his policies had failed were explained away by the failures of the last administration.

This would be completely excusable and would not be considered outside of the norm had he not made a point of trying to emphasize bipartisanship. Throughout the speech “the Great Unifier” tried to highlight the fact that no matter our differences, the difficulties that we face are the same, no matter one’s political ideologies or party loyalty.

Despite this noble attempt, Obama failed to foster or encourage any sort of bipartisan sentiments during his speech. His comments on the failures not only of the past administration, but also at the government of the past eight years, one in which a Republican President was in office and for a majority of the time the Congress was ruled by the Republicans, created distance with non-Democrats.

But my issues, and other conservative’s issues with the President, are ones that can be attributed to any party loyalist whose respective party has been ousted from power. Perhaps when Obama’s term ends and if he fails to be reelected, then the next Republican president (please don’t let it be Sarah Palin) will make the same comments about Obama’s presidency and the failures during his four years of leadership.

What Obama really needs to do is not fool himself. He is not this Great Unifier that he presents himself as. not yet at least. He puts himself on this pedestal and when he does that the American people expect great things. He needs to understand that insulting the work of members of Congress is not what unites people. What we need is someone who is truly willing to move beyond politics as usual.

Yes, there were mistakes made, but it is time to move on. What I liked about the President’s speech were the moments that he focused on the future. He forgot about the past failures and laid out what America needs, not what it failed to do.

President Obama can be a great leader; he just needs to cut the criticism of our previous administration. As he said, debate is what makes this country great, but cheap shots at past administrations are not. No matter what politics you believe in, we should all encourage our President to look to the future. Learn from the past, and stop mocking it. We can all unite behind our President on such issues as the need to develop clean energy and the need to improve our education system. Let us usher in a new generation of politics and new generation for this country. We need to start sometime and I think that time is now.

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