POLITICS JANUARY 26, 2011
-
Read Later
READ LATERAvailable only to subscribers. SUBSCRIBE TODAY
-
Listen
ARTICLE AUDIO
- Font Size
I thought that my reaction to President Obama’s State of the Union speech was colored by having spent the day listening to Chicago mayoral candidates talk about pensions and potholes, or by the two Scotches I downed afterwards, but upon rereading the speech this morning, I’m once again convinced that this was Obama’s best speech as president. I’m not so much referring to his rhetoric or delivery, both of which were fine, but to the way he answered the perennial question, “What is to be done?”
Obama is in a difficult political position, similar to that of Bill Clinton in 1995: He and his party have been rebuked at the polls, and to the extent the voters sent a message, it is one that Obama had better ignore at his and the country’s peril. It was summed up by freshman GOP Representative Nan Hayworth, who declared on the eve of the speech, “The best thing the federal government can do is stop trying to create jobs.” Obama could either capitulate to this nonsense (as to some extent Clinton did), defy his detractors (as Franklin Roosevelt did after the 1938 election), or find a way to change the conversation—a way that would allow him to do what was best for the country without dooming his party. He did the latter, and remarkably well.
He used an appeal to economic nationalism to do it. By framing America’s challenge in that fashion, he allowed himself to justify government and the further expansion of government spending and investment, and he provided a new villain (other than himself or the government) for the continuing economic downturn. And it wasn’t simply economic nationalism as a kind of game of competition. National security was the subtext of Obama’s appeal.
Except at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, Americans have only approved the expansion of government when they saw their security as a nation threatened. Think of the Civil War, the two world wars, and the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower justified his massive interstate highway program as a way of allowing tanks to get around the continent in the case of war. Ronald Reagan justified his foray into industrial policy—the creation of the semiconductor consortium, Sematech, in 1987—as a way of preventing the bad guys from getting control of high-tech weaponry. We’re not of course facing an adversary now similar to the Germans in 1941 or the Soviets in 1956, but the underlying themes endure, and Obama was able to use them to his advantage.
The key moment in his speech was when he invoked America’s Sputnik moment—a reference to when Americans learned to their horror in 1958 that the Soviets had beat them into space with the launch of the first satellite. At the time, the news about Sputnik justified a massive expansion of the space program and of federal grants for science and science education. Here’s how Obama invoked Sputnik:
Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into
space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we
had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon. The
science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But
after investing in better research and education, we
didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave
of innovation that created new industries and millions
of new jobs.
This is our generation's Sputnik moment. Two years
ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research
and development we haven't seen since the height of
the Space Race. In a few weeks, I will be sending a
budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal. We'll
invest in biomedical research, information
technology, and especially clean energy technology—
an investment that will strengthen our security,
protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for
our people.
So what, you might ask? The Cold War is over. But Americans know that we have a new economic, and possibly military, adversary across the Pacific, and that some of America’s economic woes are due to our enormous trade deficit with China. So without saying so explicitly—which would have been impolitic to say the least (we are not at war with China, and should not do anything to encourage the notion)—Obama reaped the thematic rewards of a neo-Cold War metaphor that implied a threat to our national security without sowing the actual seeds of war. Clean-energy technology, high-speed rail—they’re not just about spending money on new gadgets, they’re about national defense and survival just as the highway program was. That was the unspoken theme of Obama’s economic nationalism, and it framed the debate over government and the downturn in a new way that will allow him to promote the kind of measures that he has always wanted.
What else about Obama’s speech? In evaluating what a president says, it is important to distinguish generalities from specifics and subordinate clauses from main clauses. Generalities (“I’m going to freeze spending”) don’t count as much as specifics (cutting "billions of dollars in defense spending"). Subordinate clauses (“Although we do need to prune regulations”) don’t count as much as main clauses (“We need to protect citizens against dirty air and water”). In his speech, Obama consistently threw rhetorical subordinate clauses to the opposition while preserving and defending his own liberal agenda in the main, specific clauses. Look at the way he described regulatory review:
To reduce barriers to growth and investment, I've
ordered a review of government regulations. When we
find rules that put an unnecessary burden on
businesses, we will fix them. But I will not hesitate to
create or enforce commonsense safeguards to protect
the American people. That's what we've done in this
country for more than a century. It's why our food is
safe to eat, our water is safe to drink, and our air is
safe to breathe. It's why we have speed limits and
child labor laws. It's why last year, we put in place
consumer protections against hidden fees and
penalties by credit card companies, and new rules to
prevent another financial crisis. And it's why we
passed reform that finally prevents the health
insurance industry from exploiting patients.
Obama used the same rhetorical strategy in discussing education and his health care bill. The opposition can’t say they were ignored, but the thrust of his message was a defense of the agenda with which he came into office in January 2009. And to Obama’s credit, he found a new way in this speech to present this message—a way will, one hopes, help reverse his administration’s and the country’s fortunes over the next two years.
John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic.
10 comments
The chattering peanut gallery of the far-right won't and didn't hear any of the President's message. On far-right forums, they consider Obama to be both a traitor and illegally the President. So even a bipartisan call to defend and rebuild America and American exceptionalism along the lines of renewed investment in the future continues to fall on deaf ears at a time when we need the average American to get beyond their own prejudices and will-full ignorance get on with the arduous task of rebuilding America. Instead these same folks would rather whine about how the "liberal socialist agenda" is driving the US towards extinction and calling for a return to the good ol' days while simultaneously ignoring the devastation that 25+ years of GOP economic policy have wrought on the American landscape as they kick the can down the road. They're negativism has reached such a degree of internalized hate that they can't let themselves even listen to a countervailing position without their heads exploding.
- singlspeed
January 26, 2011 at 2:13pm
Best speech? Maybe, but only so far.
- Robert Powell
January 26, 2011 at 3:45pm
I think most Progressive Dem voters view BHO like Eliza views Freddy in My Fair Lady re " Dont talk of love (stimulus job creation), SHOW ME. Speach was full of sweet-nothings and no job-creating policy proposals that BHO could fail to deliver.
- drofnats1
January 26, 2011 at 4:32pm
Until he stops talking in terms of taxing the wealthy, which always sounds like wealth redistribution, and starts talking in terms of common sense funding of the government (e.g. collecting more revenue from people who can afford to pay so we can collect less revenue from people who can not afford to pay; and taxation relative to economic benefit from our economy,) I see a problem.
- Nusholtz
January 26, 2011 at 4:39pm
There is another advantage to framing the economic challenge in terms of nationalistic competition with foreign rivals: This paradigm evokes the notion of rallying around the president in a time of (economic) war, thereby making the president's domestic opponents seem like enemies of the national cause. This is a better frame for the president than the debate over "big government versus small government" or "spending versus saving".
- nathang
January 26, 2011 at 6:01pm
Obama's goal is for the image in the public mind in 2012 to be: * Obama inherited a bad economy, and now it's improving. * Obama wants the US to invest in order to out-compete foreign rivals like China; the Republicans oppose this effort. * Obama wants to move the country forward; the Republican's want to re-litigate the past debate on health care. This last point is carries more risk for Republicans than they may realize. While the Tea Partiers get excited about repealing health care reform, polls show that most people are not in favor of doing so. Moreover, a lot of the opposition to health care reform last year resulted from people feeling that the president and congress spent too much time discussing health care, and not enough time trying to help the economy. Now it's the Republicans turn to fixate on the old health care debate, while Obama and the Democrats can portray themselves as focused on the economy.
- nathang
January 26, 2011 at 6:34pm
@drofnats: Show me, indeed. I’ll go on record now with my prediction that nothing of macroeconomic significance will be accomplished in the next two years on infrastructure or green tech. The Republican opposition is too powerful, and they hold the distinct advantage that their government-is-the-problem narrative is self-fulfilling: slash spending on grounds that government is wasteful and incompetent then, lo and behold, underfunded government agencies become wasteful and incompetent. Obama’s crisis—in the dramaturgical sense—came early in his administration, on the question of economic stimulus and how big it should be. The political history of the last two years all stems from that single decision. On the stimulus question Obama faced his biggest test, and sadly for him and for the rest of us, he failed. Everything that has happened since is all just the necessary aftermath. Now, if I’m wrong and Obama does manage to enact an agenda such as the one he hinted at in this STOTU speech and if it is of a scale to make anything more than window dressing, I’ll be the first to admit my error and offer Obama my thanks, but I just don’t see it happening. If he hasn’t done so already, Obama would do well to read Conrad’s “Lord Jim.” I’m not talking about the early sections where in a moment of cowardice Jim acts in a way that threatens to ruin his life completely, but at the end after Jim has found previously untapped reservoirs of physical bravery and has, at least partially, redeemed himself. He fails a second time, a failure that at novel’s end has cost him his best friend’s life as well as his own, but this time Jim’s failure is not a failure of nerve, it’s a failure of judgment, specifically the failure adequately to gauge the depths of duplicity and rapaciousness in his opponents and in consequence to negotiate with men whom he should have sought to destroy. “Changing the conversation,” as Judis suggests that Obama is trying to do might well enhance Obama’s re-election chances, but unless and until the Republicans’ erroneous, harmful ideology is confronted directly and discredited, they will continue successfully to thwart meaningful progress in any of the areas highlighted in the president’s speech.
- AaronW
January 26, 2011 at 7:14pm
I am a little doubful about the President right now. My skepticism stems from his tax hikes he eneacted in his first two years. First the President decided to raise Capital Gains taxes to pay for health care. While this was aimed at people making significant amounts of gains, it is still a raid on capital. Second, during the implementation of the 'Bush' Tax Cuts, they again raised the Capital gains rate another 5%. Significant increases of 20-30% written into a 'Tax Cut' bill. Yes he saved the Banks and the Automakers, but the shareholders were wiped out and the Bond Holders were drawn into crazy deals where they got warrants for 20-30% of their face value bonds. This while most of the workers in these companies were protected. As the President talks about investing in America, I am not sure he believes in the risks and rewards of investing as we know it in the private sector.
- CRS9TNR
January 26, 2011 at 10:28pm
Aaron. You are correct. The economic mess BHO has helped create is in large part due to his initial inadequate stimulus (that he touted as the perfect solution) that prevented a Great Depression, but guaranteed a Great Recession due to last for years. His economic policies have gone downhill from there. In fact, his even more basic failure was to not push the Senate to eliminate the filibuster (it could be/have been done at any time with a simple majority vote via the nuclear option). He has frittered awsay more political power that any Democratric President has held since LBJ.
- drofnats1
January 26, 2011 at 11:08pm
"First the President decided to raise Capital Gains taxes to pay for health care. While this was aimed at people making significant amounts of gains, it is still a raid on capital." I'm sorry, CRS, but which President are you talking about? It's definitely not the one in the United States, who didn't raise any capital gains taxes to pay for the Affordable Care Act. Is this in the same league as the 12,500 additional IRS agents and the death panels?
- wildboy
January 27, 2011 at 4:49pm