Without Occupy Wall Street, you would have seen the exact same State of the Union speech. [View all]

[TheWraith]

And that's really easy to prove, since you can go back and look at the past three, and notice that Obama has been hitting the same themes all along. Hell, go back further, and read his 2002 speech going against the Iraq War, and you'll find many themes in common: peace dividends, clean energy, real national security strategies, and fixing the economy.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone thru the worst month since the Great Depression.... You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Queda, thru effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons in already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

http://lessig.org/blog/2008/01/barack_obamas_2002_speech.html

Frankly, it annoys the crap out of me for people to try and take credit for something that they had nothing to do with, and was already going on. To give credit for the State of the Union to "Occupy Wall Street" requires that you ignore all the history of Obama's rhetoric and positions, all the history of his experience as a campaigner and community organizer, and start the clock a few months ago in order to magnify out of all proportion the effect of a short-lived and ultimately ineffectual protest movement. Sorry, but Barack Obama was there long before "Occupy Wall Street," and he's still here afterward, because he looks at the long game. I for one am grateful for that, because it means he won't give up and go home when the entire capitalist system fails to crumble in response to one act of disagreement.