If you think otherwise, you absolutely are not paying attention.

I was live tweeting during the State of the Union speech last week and thinking about how much I have come to dislike or outright despise nearly everyone in that chamber, from the President on out, how insufferably arrogant and completely out of touch they are about the lives most Americans are leading.

The one exception to that was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who tendered her resignation because she needs to focus on her rehabilitation and because unlike most of the people in the chamber, she really does have her constituents’ best interests at heart.

But the rest of them?

It was difficult to listen to President Obama without screaming. And having to watch the alternately smug, disgruntled and smirking face of Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) for over an hour was also unbearable. I should have done what Vice President Biden did and take a nap instead.

The SOTU speech is supposed to give the American people an update on what the President is doing for the nation. It’s required by the Constitution because the Founding Fathers did not want the President to try and sneak in any extra-constitutional activities. It’s supposed to provide transparency.

We wish.

That was then, this is now. President Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, have each given themselves powers that are not only extra-constitutional, but, if we had a less apathetic electorate, would have been cause for impeachment of both men.

Maybe.

One of those extra-constitutional acts–the right to assassinate that Obama granted himself last year–was one of only three things that got applause from both sides of the aisle during the SOTU. (U.S. presidents don’t actually have the power to assassinate anyone, of course. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s just something President Obama decided he’d like to do. The ACLU is pretty upset about it, and so should you be.)

Yes, we all wanted to see Osama bin Laden brought to justice. But the President went into a sovereign nation, Pakistan, with which we are not officially at war (even though we kill their citizens on a regular basis in drone attacks, which if someone did it to us–like on 9/11–we would consider it war), and had him killed. Not exactly playing by international rules set by us with the Geneva Convention.

The President also authorized the assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. Also not in the Constitution. Nor is indefinite detention of American citizens, which Obama just signed into law last month.

You probably think, as do many Americans, that these guys had it coming. But if the Philadelphia Police Department decided to start killing alleged criminals on the streets of Philadelphia, would you think that was okay, too? Some of you might, but isn’t that what we used to call a slippery slope? When the President decides to become judge, jury and executioner–even if we agree emotionally with the decision–it’s dangerous for all of us. It means the President can act on his own, with impunity. Unfortunately, then any one of us could end up on the wrong side of assassination or indefinite detention in Guantanamo (which he promised to close three years ago) or in a federal prison in the U.S., like Pvt. Bradley Manning.

Because the war on terror will never be over. T

his is why we have a Constitution and rules of law. Yet the extra-Constitutional assassination of bin Laden was the biggest applause line of the night, even from the disgruntled Mr. Speaker and his Republican cohort.

Another line that got big applause was Obama’s declaration about more jobs, because even the Republicans and the Blue Dog Democrats have to applaud more jobs in a recession. Except the President’s plan for more jobs doesn’t deserve applause, because the President’s plan is deeply, deeply flawed.

Someone needs to tell the President what year it is. It’s 2012, not 1912. We live in an era of globalization. Thus, while even supporters of Ron Paul isolationism can applaud Obama’s “keep jobs in America and keep foreign products out!” those aren’t the rules we play by any more. Yes, we should all buy American and we should all boycott cheap Chinese products.

Except that if we do that, the Chinese will do it, too. And American industry cannot survive on U.S. sales alone. We need to sell our wares to other countries. China is the world’s largest economy and the fastest growing one. Where are we going to sell our products? Greece?

 It’s short-sighted and naive to think that America can be just American in the 21st century. Yes, we want to keep as many jobs in the U.S. as possible. But we also want to lure foreign trade and businesses here. We can’t have it both ways. But that’s what the President proposed. Big tax breaks for corporations (do they really need more tax breaks?) that keep jobs here. Punishment for corporations that take jobs abroad.

The President also promised two million new jobs. Except we’ve lost eight million jobs and currently there are 17 million Americans who are either unemployed or underemployed. And that doesn’t count Americans who have stopped looking for work. In addition, the jobs being proposed are not the jobs that have been lost.

This is one of the most critical elements of America’s current economic crisis and one which no one–not President Obama nor any of the Republican candidates for president–is discussing. The jobs Obama is promising to bring back–against every economist’s best odds–are manufacturing jobs. But again, this is not 1912, it’s 2012. And while it would be helpful to have more manufacturing jobs, these are not the jobs we have recently lost. Those jobs have been gone for decades. The jobs we need back are middle-class jobs, not factory jobs.

We don’t have a shrinking working class in America, we have a shrinking middle class. The gap between the rich and the poor in America is growing in large part because the middle class are becoming poorer. In previous generations the poor worked their way up the economic ladder and became middle class. Obama talked about providing career-advancing training for workers, but again, this would be for low-level jobs, not middle-level income jobs.

What’s more, we need jobs for our graduating students. We already have a huge jobs deficit for people 25 and under. While the unemployment rate is hovering around eight percent for the total population, it’s closer to 25 percent for younger workers.

We need a bigger, bolder, 21st century plan, not the self-congratulatory small-strokes plan the President outlined. Mitt Romney has a 57 point plan, of which some points even make sense. But neither of these men, the current president or the likely Republican nominee, is looking at the big picture of America’s future.

The jobs crisis isn’t a one- or two- or even five-year problem. It’s a 21st century-long problem. There is no short-term fix, it has to be a long-term plan. And no one seems to get that, except the economists on both sides of the aisle who are all tearing out their hair and screaming, like I was while watching the SOTU.

Eighty years ago, when Franklin D. Roosevelt began trying to staunch the economic hemorrhage that was the Great Depression, he had vision and singleness of purpose. When his Republican opposition tried to stop him, he ignored them and pushed on for the good of the country. There are some Republicans who still grumble over FDR, but he, like Lincoln, preserved the Union, albeit in different ways.

America in 2012 doesn’t have 30 percent unemployment like there was during the Great Depression, but we do have one in seven people on food stamps–one in three in Philadelphia–and we do have an evisceration of the middle class that is the real thing strangling the American economy.

The declining middle class in America is comprised of people whose mortgages are being foreclosed upon, who can’t afford their health care, who can’t afford to send their kids to college or whose kids have graduated from college and moved back home because they can’t find jobs. There are no more pensions, 401Ks have lost value due to stock market fluctuations, Social Security is at risk and the retirement age is rising every year because people can’t afford to stop working, if they are lucky enough to have a job.

The President addressed none of these painful realities in the SOTU, nor is he addressing them on the campaign trail, nor has he addressed them in his presidency. Yet if Obama can grant himself the executive power to assassinate people and get applause from both sides of the aisle, then why can’t he grant himself the executive power to go big on fixing the American economy, like FDR did during the last depression?

It’s one of many questions American voters should be asking between now and November.

The decline and fall of political figures is one of the least pretty things to witness. But I’m not thinking about Obama now, since I think he still has a second and even third act in him. I’m thinking about John Edwards.

I used to like John Edwards. A lot, actually. His placement on the ticket was the only way I was able to actually vote for John Kerry, who I found politically tone-deaf  in the way John McCain would be in 2008. Making the 2004 election a referendum on Vietnam was simply stupid and lost Kerry the election.

But John Edwards easy populism was both engaging and believable as a counter-point to Kerry’s heavy-handed elitism cum militarism. I liked what Edwards had to say and what’s more, I thought he meant it. Did he get his ass handed to him in the debate with Dick Cheney? Sure. But who wouldn’t have? Not too many people have gone up against Satan and won, after all.

I still liked Edwards in 2007. His message continued to include a segment of the population everyone else seemed to ignore: the poor. He seemed in touch in ways that were compelling. It was clearly the wrong year for him, but I thought he’d end up in either a Clinton or Obama administration in a serious post like Attorney General.

I was surprised when he and wife Elizabeth announced that her cancer was back, but he was staying in the race. It was the first time I felt a frisson of  discomfiture. Surely they weren’t putting politics above her very survival? Or–the thought crossed my mind more than once—were they counting on a sympathy vote?

The press conference left me with a feeling of ickiness that only intensified in the coming weeks. By the time Edwards seemed to be tag-teaming Obama to take down “the girl,” Hillary Clinton, in New Hampshire, I had started to feel real dislike for him. There was a combination of arrogance and desperation that I was beginning to see in his attitude, which I wrote about in a column after New Hampshire. It was, I noted, just a matter of time before he had the sense, since it was too late for grace, to withdraw.

He did–later than he should have done, and with a kind of nasty fanfare that put a sour note to all the good he might have done supporting either Obama or Hillary.

And then he held them hostage. Waiting to use his endorsement to do the most harm to one of them—and secure a solid place for himself with the other. It was creepy and not a little pathetic.

And that was all before the bombshell hit that he’d been having an affair with a staffer, paid her enormous amounts of money, snuck into hotel rooms after hours to see her–and that the woman had a new baby. The unraveling had begun in earnest.

The lesson of the Lewinsky scandal should have been more than cautionary for every cheating politico: Don’t lie about it. When half the world has a camera/video phone, what level of arrogance do you have to have to think you can lie and get away with it?

So today the Edwards’ have officially split. Elizabeth Edwards told People that she’d “had enough.”

I don’t feel the least bit sorry for her. Three and a half years ago I would have felt sorry for her as I would have for any woman who was battling cancer and whose husband was cheating on her with a much younger woman. But not now.

I never like to see women be humiliated. I watched Gayle Haggard on Oprah yesterday explaining how she loves the straying gay Ted too much to leave him (not coincidententally she was plugging her book Why I Stayed).  It was cringeworthy, to be sure. And made more so by Ted asserting that he wasn’t gay anymore and that there was ample proof of that, wink wink, nudge nudge, ew ew.

Elizabeth Edwards was more refined, or so it seemed. She had a classiness and a sweetness that belied her hard-edged political ambitions for her husband. As for Edwards, he was clearly being punished and it showed. While he didn’t seem capable of true contrition, he certainly seemed sorry. Living with St. Elizabeth could not have been easy.

But what neither Edwards seemed to get, and why I have no sympathy, empathy or anything but anger toward them, was that they both colluded  in the most hubristic fashion to lie to the American people for their own personal goals. Both of them wanted the White House or at the very least, the closest they could get to it. And in concert–very much as a couple, not as estranged partners–they decided to stand in a press conference together and lie. And then lie again, and again and again–on Oprah and every other TV show they could get onto.

Did Elizabeth Edwards really not believe that Frances Quinn was her husband’s child? She told Oprah the baby “doesn’t look like my children.” But did she look like her father?

What if John Edwards had won the primary? What if he had come as close to winning as Hillary did? How much damage were both John and Elizabeth Edwards willing to impart on the Democratic Party and the country to advance their own political ambitions?

It’s ugly to watch a marriage fall apart. It’s ugly to watch a political figure who once shone tarnish almost overnight. But one thing we have learned–without the help of F. Scott Fitzgerald–is that in American politics there are indeed second acts if one is honest and forthright and does some modicum of penance and tries not to screw the citizenry the way they screwed their spouse.

The Edwards’ are not those people. The Edwards’ still don’t get it. John thinks he can acknowledge his daughter publicly two years after the fact and all will be forgiven. Elizabeth thinks she can pull the victim card yet again and we will buy it just because People  put her on their cover.

No one doubts at this point that John Edwards is a cad. He seems incapable of telling the truth, even now, and it’s the children who are suffering. And Elizabeth seems to have left her marriage solely because there was no way to redeem it publicly. She didn’t leave three and a half years ago, she left this week when Andrew Young’s tell all book became available with rumors of a sex tape.

One could say that the Edwards’ deserve each other. One could say that they both need a good ass-whipping and a lesson in civic responsibility and pride. One could say that their children are the real victims here—and they are. But mostly one can only say as bad as things might shake out to be after Obama gives his State of the Union speech, at least John Edwards didn’t win the nomination. Obama still has time for another act, even if the Edwards’ do not.—VAB