The day of the president's last big speech dawns and, as our courtier press trembles at the notion that he might try to actually be president, I myself partake of the wisdom of the past and of his predecessors in the office. Such as, say, Millard Fillmore, president of the United States, the 13th of that title, who took the opportunity on December 2, 1850 to express such deep devotion to the concept of bipartisan compromise that it's a wonder that Cokie Roberts isn't lighting a candle under his picture every night. He may have been elected as a Whig, but Millard was a true Third Way no labels kind of high-collar, he was.

It was hardly to have been expected that the series of measures passed at your last session with the view of healing the sectional differences which had sprung from the slavery and territorial questions should at once have realized their beneficent purpose. All mutual concession in the nature of a compromise must necessarily be unwelcome tomen of extreme opinions. And though without such concessions our Constitution could not have been formed, and can not be permanently sustained, yet we have seen them made the subject of bitter controversy in both sections of the Republic. It required many months of discussion and deliberation to secure the concurrence of a majority of Congress in their favor. It would be strange if they had been received with immediate approbation by people and States prejudiced and heated by the exciting controversies of their representatives. I believe those measures to have been required by the circumstances and condition of the country. I believe they were necessary to allay asperities and animosities that were rapidly alienating one section of the country from another and destroying those fraternal sentiments which are the strongest supports of the Constitution. They were adopted in the spirit of conciliation and for the purpose of conciliation.

Yes, sir, among these "measures" guaranteed to allay all those asperities and animosities was the Fugitive Slave Act, a creature of conciliation if I ever saw one. For his part, Millard enforced the act, even in the north, but he refused to let the Southerners make Cuba a slave state. Neither side was entirely happy, so what he was doing must have been "leadership." Ron Fournier would have ridden on the Fillmore tire swing, that's for certain.

Bidding fair to cement his reputation as the worst hack of the current millennium, Fournier launched a pre-emptive strike against the president, warning him not to act like a president too much.

More than that, Obama's plan to exert executive branch authority, starting with his State of the Union address, further illustrates his unfamiliarity with the levers of political power, the limits of his leadership style, and the vast amount of time and potential squandered by the president so far. "We need to assure the American people that we can get something done either through Congress or on our own because what they want are answers," White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union."... Didn't know enough? After five years in office? This official, like so many others in the West Wing, apparently is not sufficiently self-aware to realize he confirmed an Obama critique-that the president is too removed and disinterested from the political process to affect it, that he doesn't value congressional relations enough to give them anything more than lip service, and that, for his enormous intellectual gifts, Obama is handicapped by a lack of political curiosity. He chose not to know enough about the Republicans.

What was there to know? That they were the most singularly reckless and irresponsible collection of vandals in the history of democratic government? That, in 2010, the country went so off-the-rails bananas that they elected a chronic ward instead of a Congress? That one of the only two political parties that we have permitted ourselves has abandoned its duty to help govern the nation in favor of Bible-banging hayshakers, goldbug nutballs, and ascendant plutocrats who would just as soon treat the political entity known as the United States of America as one more mountaintop to remove, one more river to poison, one more beachfront to despoil? That the party is deeply, completely, and utterly batshit insane? Does Fournier seriously believe that the president didn't look at the field of candidates arrayed against him in the 2012 Republican primary field and wonder how more than a few of them had escaped four-point restraints? The president relied on the good-faith of a sociopathic American corporate elite, and on the essential patriotism of a political party full of poo-flinging morons. If Fournier wants to write that, he should feel free.

But, no, hiding behind his betters, Fournier cites a David Remnick profile, and a John Dickerson piece in Slate (with which I didn't agree very much) to get back to his favorite little chew-toy...LEADERSHIP! (Fournier, you may recall, loves him LEADERSHIP! so much that he was willing to suck upto a lycanthropic ratfker like Karl Rove to get a whiff of some.) But Ron would also like to know that it's a little too late for the president to make up with him now.

The story raises several other questions. First, why did it take this long for the White House to discover the power of executive orders and rule-making? (Republicans are warning of "tyrannical executive orders," ignoring the fact that GOP presidents issue them, too.) For instance, Obama has refused to use the power of clemency in a broad way to correct injustice in crack-cocaine sentencing. He punted to Congress the most important questions about NSA overreach rather than taking executive action. And now we're supposed to be impressed by his pen and phone? At the same time, executive orders are far less durable than laws passed by Congress in bipartisan fashion. The next president can reverse actions Obama takes with a stroke of a pen. It's a legacy written in invisible ink. Is that good enough for Obama?

The president now stands accused of believing too long and too earnestly in the capacity or willingness of the national legislature to do its fking job, and of believing too long and too earnestly in the capacity or the willingness of the American people to notice and to insist that it do so. At this point, I suspect the president could give a rat's ass what impresses Ron Fournier any more. (We know Ron remains impressed by the previous president does, of course, whose "legacy" is "written" in the blood of other people's children.) But, for what it's worth, I really do hope the president goes the full Cromwell on the Congress tonight. I hope he wears out 150 pens in the next three days signing as many executive orders as they can put in front of him. If the other side if willing to talk openly about nullification, and to play footsie with outright sedition, then he should give it good reason to do so. He should use every legitimate constitutional power at his disposal to scare the living daylights out of them.

He should take back, in every detail, the speech that made him famous in Boston in 2004, because subsequent events have rendered it either naive or the most grotesque of fantasies. He should explain to this Congress, and to the country that visited that Congress upon him and upon itself, that, in doing so, it may well have dealt a blow to self-government from which self-government may not recover for a very long time. I hope he makes the point quite clearly that a party that cannot control Ted Cruz is so clearly demented as to never be trusted with any kind of power again. (I also hope he mentions neither the Keystone XL pipeline nor Guantanamo Bay, but I'm not shooting the moon here.) It is the affirmative obligation of the opposing party to point out -- constantly, and in vivid detail -- that the other party is walking around with a bird on its head. It is the affirmative obligation of the president -- who, after all, really has nothing more to lose -- to be the loudest voice doing so, and then to move on and govern the country, if nobody else wants the latter job.

He should pronounce himself ready to stand the gaff. If he really does begin signing executive orders and acting like a president, then the howls from the monkeyhouse opposition will be audible on Neptune. It long has been the obvious conclusion of those folks that this president was elected (twice) in order to be a largely ceremonial figure, and to embody the greatness of America in overcoming its original sins, but not actually to be president. My dear young man, that simply is...not...done. To them, his election (twice) to the presidency was merely yet another bipartisan "compromise" that demonstrates the beneficent genius of America, not a mandate for government, because don't be ridiculous, darlings. After all, remember the wise words of Millard Fillmore, president of the United States, the 13th of that title, who taught us that the genius of the American system occurs when both sides cut a deal of which nobody entirely approves, and that there is no problem so great that our political class cannot agree to kick it down the road a few years no matter how much misery that causes to the people who don't count for much, anyway. That, friends, is LEADERSHIP!

In my last annual message I stated that I considered the series of measures which had been adopted at the previous session in reference to the agitation growing out of the Territorial and slavery questions as a final settlement in principle and substance of the dangerous and exciting subjects which they embraced, and I recommended adherence to the adjustment established by those measures until time and experience should demonstrate the necessity of further legislation to guard against evasion or abuse. I was not induced to make this recommendation because I thought those measures perfect, for no human legislation can be perfect. Wide differences and jarring opinions can only be reconciled by yielding something on all sides, and this result had been reached after an angry conflict of many months, in which one part of the country was arrayed against another, and violent convulsion seemed to be imminent.

Imminent? Hell, it took 12 more years. Nice job, Millard. I mean, what do you people want, anyway?

MORE ON THE STATE OF THE UNION:

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• Former Obama Speechwriter: How to Write the SOTU

• What Dumb Thing Will Distract Us This Year?

• I Just Checked Twitter and the State of Our Union Is Fine



Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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