Soccer Mom: Unplugged

The State of the Union address is over for another year and once again we are left to analyze and decipher every word of the president's speech.  We are forced to listen to news analysts evaluate the number of 'interruptions for applause' there were during the speech.  And pundits will talk for days about who stood for which ovation and who managed a photo op with the leader of the free world.

What is interesting, however, is the sound that we don't hear.

We don't hear the voices of democratic politicians stepping up to offer an alternative agenda.  We hear "No. No. No."  But what is absent is "Let's do this."  The party of opposition has nothing to offer. 

The National Democratic Party has become a shameless group of pandering whiners whose only concern is how to keep themselves in power.  Part of the proof is in the fact that only a small handful of moderate dems applauded when the president outlined legislation designed to aid American workers.  Democrats don't support workers.  Workers pay taxes and they want their money back!  Dems support the unemployed and underemployed because these groups like government handouts.  They also support the overemployed - rich men like George Soros who bank in Switzerland but demand that the rest of us regular working joes pay for entitlements they think poor people should have.  

The face of the republican party has become that of the middle class suburban worker.  People like me, one generation off of the tobacco field.  Those of us who are first generation college grads and who know the power of upward mobility because we worked for it and had parents who sacrificed long hours of blood, sweat and tears to offer us a better life.  We are children of parents who thought that a government benefit was the last option, not the first.  Parents who believed that no job was too menial if it put food on the table and clothed their children.  We are the children who went to church and learned that just as we are responsible for our fellow men, he is also responsible for himself and has the ability and the obligation to become better through his own hard work.  That puritan work ethic that established this nation's first lasting colony, runs deep in our hearts and souls and colors our ideologies. 

Tonight, the President of the United States of America, a republican by party, has offered his ideas about national and international issues.  And yet, the ultimate power behind enacting any legislation that reflects these ideas remains in the houses of Congress.  Will the democrats offer alternatives or will they stonewall?  From where I'm sitting, here in my DC hotel room, all I hear is the sound of silence.