Sometimes the President needs a reality check.

Unlike many on the Left, when Barack Obama was running for president I recognized that he was no liberal. He sounded like one, and certainly said the right things, but when it came to the substantive issues, Obama was a centrist with some leanings to the left. When liberals cry about Obama’s betrayal of his liberal base, I have to wonder what they're talking about, given his campaign for an expanded war in Afghanistan and merit pay for teachers. Still, it has been hard not to be disappointed in his presidency, since he continues to reach out to Republicans who insist on rebuking him at every turn, simply because he’s a Democract.

I expected that Obama's State of the Union Address this past January would be an appeal to the Right. If you weren't listening critically, that’s what you heard, and liberals did moan about the questionable spending freeze. However, if you were paying attention, what you heard was a speech about increased domestic spending to create jobs. That's fine. For most of the speech I was quite pleased with the direction Obama seemed to be moving: he kicked Republican ass unabashedly, called out the Supreme Court for laying the groundwork for the Corporate States of America and, most of all, reminded people that Democrats actually care about job creation, even if Congressional leadership seems to suggest otherwise.

Then Obama said the magic words that nearly caused me to spit my soda out all over my television: “But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives,” President Obama said. “And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies.” What the hell is clean coal?! Offshore drilling?! Obama had gone off the deep end. I knew that Obama had supported clean coal in the past. Still, you would have figured that — with all of the resources available to him — he would have figured out that clean coal is as big a fantasy as trickle down economics or Sarah Palin’s camaraderie with blue-collar workers.

An otherwise great State of the Union Address was ruined by Obama's pledge of support for nonsensical energy solutions. Nuclear energy is fine as a bridging technology between what we have now and the technologies of the future — like geothermal, solar, and nuclear fusion energy. But clean coal makes as much sense as another Wall Street bailout. Clean coal is not a solution to anything. We know that Obama comes from a coal mining state, which may be the source of his interest in clean coal. Still, that’s no excuse for embracing the fantasies of an archaic industry that refuses to recognize its own irrelevancy.

References: State of the Union transcript, available at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100128/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_obama_state_of_the_union_text