The Obama administration employed what it thought would be a poignant “optic” during Tuesday’s State of the Union address. It left one chair empty in the first lady’s gallery guest box “for the victims of gun violence who no longer have a voice.”

But it was a shallow gesture considering the number of poorly enforced gun laws already on the books and the posturing of this administration. It also was a metaphor for the empty suit that Mr. Obama is. To wit, three examples among many:

• The “crowning achievement” of ObamaCare has been a multifaceted failure of market perversion that has led to, as one pundit put it, health insurance that ceased to be insurance and became “a very badly constructed cost-sharing program,” one that has increased costs, reduced care and stunted economic growth.

• A reality-defying foreign policy of appeasement that has soiled the reputation of the United States at home and abroad and left the planet scrambling to quash the rising tide of terrorism.

• A fealty to the theology that is “climate change” has become one of myriad refuges for a president seeking a political legacy at the expense of reality — social, economic and scientific.

The state of our union is troubled, from within and from without. Symbolic empty chairs cannot rescue it. And as the past seven years have shown, neither can an empty suit masquerading as a president.

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