This week, while in Davos for the World Economic Forum, I watched President Obama deliver what was a great State of the Union speech... for 2009. Proposing the establishment of a financial crimes unit in January 2012 is like waiting three years before sending firemen to the scene of an inferno. The speech was full of good proposals that will never happen in a year dominated by electioneering. The president's pre-speech embrace with Gabby Giffords took me back to last January, and that horrific Saturday in Tucson -- a tragedy that led to widespread agreement that what we needed as a country was, as Pima County's Sheriff Clarence Dupnik put it at the time, "a little soul searching." Unfortunately, in the year since then, our collective soul has gone largely unsearched -- and the gulf between our leaders' rhetoric and the reality millions are struggling with everyday has continued to widen.
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This week, while in Davos for the World Economic Forum, I watched President Obama deliver what was a great State of the Union speech... for 2009. Proposing the establishment of a financial crimes unit in January 2012 is like waiting three years before sending firemen to the scene of an inferno. The speech was full of good proposals that will never happen in a year dominated by electioneering. The president's pre-speech embrace with Gabby Giffords took me back to last January, and that horrific Saturday in Tucson -- a tragedy that led to widespread agreement that what we needed as a country was, as Pima County's Sheriff Clarence Dupnik put it at the time, "a little soul searching." Unfortunately, in the year since then, our collective soul has gone largely unsearched -- and the gulf between our leaders' rhetoric and the reality millions are struggling with everyday has continued to widen.

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