Obama's State of the Union Challenge: Set the CourseRobert L. Borosage - President, Institute for America's Future
Posted: January 19, 2011 02:05 PM
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Will the president's state of the union address next Tuesday be another transcendent Obama moment?
As we've witnessed repeatedly, from the moment he burst on the national scene at the 2004 Democratic Convention in Boston to last week in Tucson, President Obama can touch Americans like no other political leader. He does so most often by providing the poetry that reminds us that we are all Americans, that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there is the United States of America." He invokes our common values, our common concerns. Can the president use his State of the Union address next week to call Americans to a common cause in a bitterly polarized politics?
The forbidding backdrop should rouse the president to his best. Forget about where legislators sit; the question is where they stand. The president faces an unremittingly hostile Republican majority in the Congress that benefited from obstructing everything he sought to do in his first two years, and that cowers in fear of its aroused right-wing base. He has a weak and divided Democratic majority in the Senate, compromised by its need for campaign cash, and divided by its conservative corporate wing. He faces a Beltway establishment, congealed in no small part by billionaire Pete Peterson's patrimony, fixated on deficit reduction.
At the same time, the actual state of the union, to use a technical economic term, sucks. In his first two years, Obama rescued the economy from freefall, saved the banks and auto industry from bankruptcy, and pushed for reform in areas vital to our future -- heath care, new energy, financial reform, education, Iraq and more, generating the greatest surge of progressive reform since the 1960s.
But outside the Beltway, the devastation continues. More than 20 million people are in need of full-time work; one in four homes with mortgages is underwater; foreclosures continue at record levels. 50 million people go without health insurance and costs continue to soar for those who have it. China has captured the lead in new energy, and gas prices are rising. The top six banks are more concentrated and bigger than they were before the collapse. The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans continues to capture about 25 percent of the nation's income, while controlling more wealth than 90 percent of Americans combined. Iraq may be winding down, but casualties and costs are rising in Afghanistan. The trade deficit is rising, back over $1 billion a day. Corporations, now exemplified by General Electric, pay for access to the Chinese market by handing over our most advanced technology. Tuition hikes are outstripping increases in aid programs. Classrooms grow more crowded as teachers are cut. Our decrepit infrastructure is increasingly dangerous to our health. It is ugly out here.
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Much More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-l-borosage/obama-state-of-the-union_b_811123.html:shrug:
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