DOUG SCHOEN: Biggest winner and most lamentable losers from Trump's speech

 

Whether you voted for Trump or not last November, it was hard on Tuesday night not to see someone seeking to put his agenda into practice

The most bracing thing accomplished by President Donald Trump's address to a joint session of Congress was the strength of his vision and the complete lack of any alternative being presented by the Democratic Party.

Whether or not you cast your ballot for Trump in November, it was difficult on Tuesday evening not to view someone trying to implement his agenda. The president laid out to legislators and really to the world, that his highest priority is American renewal and reviving the American Dream.

Being an American patriot who recalls JFK's 1961 inaugural address, and recalls Ronald Reagan's 1980 inaugural address, it is difficult not to view the president's speech in similar terms. 

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Indeed, the tasks confronting the president are not smaller. Uncertainty at the least surrounds his success in deflating inflation, reducing the prices, finishing the war with Ukraine and demonstrating American power once more at home and abroad. Nothing in what he said before Congress suggests, following his speech to Congress, that he is closer to getting the things that he wants done than he previously was.

Nevertheless, it is extremely difficult for anyone who is an objective observer to do anything but acknowledge the future-oriented, expansive character of Trump's vision.

At the same time, it doesn't seem to me that the political party to which I still belong, with growing difficulty, has any solutions whatsoever.

The use of signage in the House Chamber, such as "false," "save Medicaid," "protect veterans," only underscored the absolute limits of my party’s ability to articulate differences. 

It is as if the Democrats have gone beyond even Clinton campaign strategist James Carville’s advice to stay silent and "play possum." They have become trivial and almost irrelevant. I write this with disappointment. I am not sure that there are any straightforward answers that we have to our problems, though there was a clear agenda for America and a clear set of policy solutions the president presented. Though I was inspired by his words, by his promises and by the employment of personal anecdote, I was saddened that what I heard did not speak to the best of what our nation is all about.

That the Democrats were only to whine and sit, in silence, left me unmoved. And it caused me to wonder if our enemies observed, theatrically, how split and divided we still are.

I quite get that in complimenting President Trump's address, I seem to have shifted parties, as it were, being a 50-year veteran mainstream Democrat.

Far from it. However, anyone who is concerned about America must back the president's big-picture objectives on the economy, inflation, the southern border, on crime and embracing peace across the globe.