(Mark Your Calendars: RealShare Apartments East, February 15th in Washington, DC).

WASHINGTON, DC-According to the latest GlobeSt.com poll, the majority of readers weren’t impressed with Pres. Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Jan. 24. About 64% of more than 340 poll respondents either thought Obama was stumping for this year’s election, or just didn’t even bother to tune in. You can read the poll results here.

However, just a little more than one out of three respondents said they thought the speech showed the president’s grasp of the nation’s problems. During the speech, Obama touted the return of manufacturing, the possible change of the tax code to reduce outsourced jobs, expanding exports, trade enforcement efforts, renewable energy, regulation reform and more efficient government.

Mark Rose, now CEO of Avison Young (based in both Chicago and Toronto), tells GlobeSt.com that Obama should be working harder to create an environment that instills confidence in the American public and business community.

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Rose, a Chicago native, was formerly CEO of Grubb & Ellis and a top executive at JLL. His firm is growing leaps and bounds in the United States, where he says global growth is now centered. Rose says he voted for Obama, but that he believes that the US president still doesn’t have “it” for the commercial real estate agenda. “I believe our industry has been plagued by a lack of confidence in decision making brought on by uncertainty in the markets, fear that we cannot control our debts and the lack of significant employment growth,” Rose says. "It would be great if the next presidential address was not only an inspiring performance, but a speech that conveys trust, a plan to drive employment growth and a president who is less comfortable being so divisive.

The government deadlock on many issues has had many CRE executives frustrated and a number of economists loathe to predict what to expect in 2012. Markets already uncertain from a lack of fundamentals such as jobs and home sales, as well as the strife in countries such as Syria, Iran and Egypt and the European debt, will likely not be settled by continued but unfulfilled guessing on the 2012 election at the end of the year. Add to this the jockeying by the different GOP candidates for first place in the primaries, and there’s just not many in the industry who can comfortably say that this will be a quiet and improving year.

There are a few CRE professionals who say that Obama, as the leader of the country, shoulders much of the blame for the slow-to-improve fundamentals and the ultimate uncertainty as we head into the new year. Robert Eaton, founder of Arroyo Grande-based Eaton Hotel Investments, didn’t have many kind words to share. “I thought it a political speech setting up his re-election points,” Eaton says. “Most of his points were either deceptive or outright lies. His domestic agenda has been to insert the federal government in our lives and his foreign policy is scary.”