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CommentUpdated at 7:57 a.m. on January 26.
By offering a plan to fix the nation’s sputtering economy, President Obama made his opening argument to American voters with tonight’s State of the Union address on why he has the vision and policies to turn the country around and to deserve reelection.
A tightly woven speech that centered prominently on domestic policy, it could be seen as a brief that argued why he deserved a second term despite the Democratic pounding in November's elections. Obama offered the tone of a statesman appropriately humbled by the ballot box. Focusing on the economy, the chief concern of Americans, he noted that while economic indicators show the economy is on a slow mend, too many Americans are falling behind.
“We are poised for progress,” Obama offered. “Two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again. But we have never measured progress by these yardsticks alone. We measure progress by the success of our people. By the jobs they can find and the quality of life those jobs offer.”
Using the address for a sober talk on the economy made sense for a president who wants a second term. The State of the Union offers the president one of his few opportunities to address a large audience without the filter of the media. In spending the vast majority of his address talking about the economy, Obama sent a clear signal to voters that he understands getting Americans back to work is their top concern—and his.
True, his policy proposals in the speech were mostly twigs and branches of past ideas, but in tying them all together, Obama offered an overarching strategy for how he plans to move the country beyond slow recovery toward brisk prosperity. He paid less attention than Republicans would have liked to deficit reduction, but most of the president's proposals are modest and could very well win bipartisan support in Congress and the backing of voters out in the country who seem wary of increased government spending. Trimming his vision is bound to help him as he moves forward with staffing his Chicago-based reelection campaign and reorganizing his White House with the addition of political adviser David Plouffe.
But the speech and the policy proposals enunciated on Tuesday night, however politically attractive, will only help his bid for a second term if they work. There's no guarantee of that.
The unemployment rate remains stubbornly higher than 9 percent. The president argued that he can restart the economy by reinvigorating American innovative spirit through policies improving education, rebuilding infrastructure, and streamlining government. In specific terms, he called for the training of 100,000 additional science, engineering, and math teachers and making massive investments in the building of high-speed rail and extending wireless Internet coverage to 98 percent of the U.S. population as ways to revive the job market and make the country more competitive. Working toward such ambitious goals may help the economy, and his reelection prospects, in the short run but it's hard to see them giving a jolt to an economy that will need to grow at a blistering pace just to recover the jobs lost in the Great Recession and keep up with an expanding population.
The speech lacked the cheerleading typical of the annual presidential address, which made it part of a future-oriented, 2012 speech. He didn't dwell on accomplishments during his first two years in office—there was brief mention of winning passage of a health care law, overhauling financial regulations, hammering out a comprehensive nuclear non-proliferation pact with Russia, and repealing the military's ban on openly gay service members. The White House knows that the electorate is more focused on the future.
Administration officials noted that the address was purposely missing the laundry-list feel that often marks the annual address. Instead, the president wanted to use his biggest audience of the year to lay out a vision for how the U.S. wins the future in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.
His remarks come at a difficult moment in American political life as well as his own. Earlier this month, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was wounded and six were killed outside an event in her Tucson district, spurring debate about the sometimes poisonous tenor of the national conversation.
“What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow,” said Obama, in a nod to Democratic and Republican lawmakers who decided to mix up the seating at the speech in a sign of bipartisan unity.
Much of the talk was a rehash of ideas Obama has offered before: pour money into high-speed rail, bolster the U.S. clean-energy industry, and look to the economic malaise as our new “Sputnik moment”—a call for the country to redouble its efforts as innovators with the same vigor as when the nation backed the space program after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space.
He also called for a five-year freeze on all spending outside of security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security—a humble extension of his earlier call to freeze spending for three years but one likely to have some resonance with deficit-worried voters.
While there are signs that the economy is on the mend, Obama acknowledged the obvious: Americans aren’t fully feeling the effects of a rebound. When he took the podium last year, unemployment hovered around 9.7 percent. Now, it's 9.4 percent.
Despite sky-high unemployment numbers, Obama has managed to maintain a respectable level of confidence among American voters. Several recent polls show that his approval ratings hover above 50 percent and he fares well in head-to-head polls with all potential GOP presidential contenders. In fact, Obama’s political fortunes are arguably rosier than President Reagan’s were at this same moment in his first term.
When Reagan delivered his State of the Union address in January 1983, the unemployment rate was at 10.4 percent and his approval rating was at 37 percent. By Election Day 1984, the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.2 percent, and Reagan won another four years in the White House.
Obama won’t likely have such a strong wind at his back, with most economists forecasting unemployment rates staying above 8 percent through 2012. But at least tonight's speech showed that he was addressing America's top concern, the economy, and doing so in a manner befitting a chastening election.
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