Cockeyed Platonist (CP) like the Establishment Republican, Paul Ryan and the Tea Party’s Michele Bachmann has decided to give his own version of national political sermonizing called the State of the Union Address. Now there is nothing to compare to the love, even the addiction, of CP for long winded abstract theorizing, it’s his intellectual bread and butter: the opportunity to woo an audience with pretentious high flown phraseology, in service to the master idea of American Exceptionalism, is an occasion for pulling out all the stops. Boosterism and the pep talk are American perennials. He unenthusiastically makes the president’s choice of styles of address between standard and visionary approaches. After that CP proceeds to deliver his own address full of the afore-mentioned rhetorical devices properly inflated for the occasion. CP writes two columns a week and this has the feel of something written over his morning coffee with a deadline staring him in the face. Even the title, ‘The Talent Magnet’ has a shopworn quality and the assertion of ‘what the country hungers for’ leads one to the unpalatable notion of a decisive paternalism, as the indispensable key to success, in the proscribed realm of national occasion: an evocation of a necessary political nostalgia wedded to masculine privilege, as sine qua non.