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One thing that became incredibly clear to anyone who put themselves through watching this year's version of the same State of the Union speech we've heard for the last few years was that this president is totally in over his head.  That, or he is completely oblivious and completely unserious about the issues facing the country.

It was almost as though we saw a pre-recorded version of the speech that was taped the day he took office - it was that detached and seemingly oblivious to everything that is going on in the country right now.  If he was aware, his speech might have been a lot shorter, and a lot more to the point.  Mark Steyn summed up the State of the Union this way:

"The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You've been a terrific crowd!"

While it wouldn't rank as one of the most encouraging and inspiring State of the Union addresses (something the speech was never really intended to be - it was supposed to be more about an executive report than a bizarre political rally), it would have been one of the most honest.

But even if you would expect Obama to be as uplifting as possible about the situation (it is an election year, after all), the country needs - and deserves - a president who will level with them about our serious state of affairs.  Steyn agreed:

An honest leader would feel he owed it to the citizenry to impress upon them one central truth ? that we can't have any new programs because we've spent all the money. It's gone. The cupboard is bare.

But we didn't get that.  In fact, we got the exact opposite:

Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union's state ? its unprecedented world-record brokeness ? was not even mentioned...[it was] an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment's still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market's pretty flat, but it's nothing that a little government "investment" in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can't fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.

The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms "will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years." Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That's some savings ? and in a mere half a decade! Why, it's equivalent to what the government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. "In the last 22 months," said the president, "businesses have created more than three million jobs." Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.

That's what conservatives mean when we say that this country cannot survive another four years of Barack Obama.  It's not a personal attack, but rather a simple awareness that this president either doesn't understand the problems we face, or worse, doesn't understand the seriousness of those problems.  If we are to the point where we won't elect someone who tells the truth because we don't want to hear it, we're toast.  2012 should be an election where we find out.

While I don't yet know who the Republican nominee will be, and the frankness with which they will talk to the American people about our serious crises, we do know exactly what to expect from the president we've got.  Those who vote for him are just as unserious as he is.