President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday was pretty good, I think. He laid out a progressive agenda worthy of a progressive president, perhaps for the first time with some actual significance. I say that because over the past six years, his address has been about stalemate in Washington or things we need to do but haven't, and more importantly, never will as long as the Republicans control the capacity of Congress to take action. His tone has been anything from conciliatory to cajoling, but it has all been for naught. This time was different because what he gave wasn't really a state of the union address. It was the Democratic platform for 2016. Over the next two years, the Democrats under the leadership...finally the leadership...of President Obama will push the initiatives limned vaguely in The President's speech whenever they get the chance to speak about policy, and come November 2016, the American voters will decide two things. First, they will decide who they are because what President Obama proposed on Tuesday night was a truly progressive shift in our national direction regarding everything from taxes to education, and he did so with a phrase, perhaps a misnomer but certainly definitive in its nature: middle class economics. The phrase says it all since much of what The President proposes is not just for the benefit of the middle class, but for those striving to get into it as well. At last we have a formulation of a progressive alternative to "trickle-down" and "supply-side" sloganeering, and sometimes a good slogan is all a politician needs. Second, the voters will decide whether what the Republicans will produce over the next two years is what they really want, that is, if the Republicans produce anything much. They haven't had to take responsibility for anything since 2006, the last year that they were in control of Congress, but the worm has turned and everything that happens, or doesn't happen for that matter, will be attributable to Republican leadership. It's put up or shut up time, and that has liberated a president who has been handcuffed since the day he took office despite the ostensible control of Congress by the Democratic Party.
The speech set a bar for the Republicans, and for the first time in his presidency, Mr. Obama doesn't have to worry about either the Republicans or the Democrats, the latter having been as fractious and bumptious a party during its periods of relative hegemony as the Republicans are now. The failure to get a single payer healthcare system passed was as much a function of the Blue Dog Democrats' intransigence as it was Republican sabotage, but it redounded only to the detriment of the Democratic Party because the Republicans incessantly and deceitfully asserted that the Democrats were in control. Now, legislative failure is no longer a reflection of Democratic haplessness. It's all the Republicans now--be careful what you wish for McBoehnell. Uh oh, too late. There's no going back now. The Republicans have been bad-mouthing the Obama era of Democratic putative control for six years, claiming that they, the Republicans, had the answers. But the economy is in pretty good shape right now, at least as far as the numbers go, and improvements are going to be only nominal for the next two years. That won't serve to affirm the Republican brag that they know better than the Democrats what we all need. And since they have claimed that the economy is still in the doldrums for the purpose of discrediting the Democrats and The President, no modicum of change will suffice to anoint them as the nation's saviors. All that talk on Tuesday night about working together was just the same old sanguine self-delusion that it was when it was first spouted in The President's 2009 inauguration address. He didn't know that inter-party cooperation could never be anything but illusory at best then, so he wedded himself to what he thought was the portent of an era of cooperation. But in the first mid-term election the Democrats got a drubbing, and in the succeeding lame duck session, the Republicans showed what the word compromise means to them. As I've said before, it doesn't mean, "let's work together." It means, "give me your lunch money," and that's exactly what President Obama and the Democrats did. The Democrats agreed to call it a compromise legislative package to save face, but as a corollary to the old saw would have it, if it doesn't walk like a duck or quack like a duck, it isn't a duck...and it wasn't. But that can never happen to Barrack Obama again.
So, the way this will all play out is that there will be a lot of stumping for the next two years, and President Obama even said he was taking to the hustings to sell his ideas. If he can just muster the courage to have a few prime-time press conferences, his efforts might well yield some actual progressive legislation, though he hasn't shown that kind of fortitude yet. What is more likely is that inch by inch, he will reclaim the political ground he has given up under the illusion of compromise. He has nothing to lose, nor does Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. The Republicans can pass whatever they like unless the Democrats use the filibuster the same way the Republicans did...basically "slash and burn." With a careful modulation between giving them what they want when it will bite them in the ass and denying them what they want when it won't, the 115th Congress will be Democratic again...the presidency too. During the same period in the Reagan administration, the conservative wing of the conservative Republican Party of the day took to saying, "let Reagan be Reagan." Now it's time for Obama to be Obama.
Your friend,
Mike
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