The union’s state is dire

Lexington

Barack Obama’s big speech to Congress was mainly a bit of electioneering

IT IS becoming hard to remember that Barack Obama’s speeches were once described as inspiring, visionary and transformational. His state-of-the-union message on January 24th was none of those things. Then again, circumstances were against him. He said, as presidents must, that the state of the union was “getting stronger”. But everyone knows that the true state of the union is dire: 13m Americans are unemployed, the recovery is fragile and at any moment the economy could be blown sideways by a new gust of bad economic news from Europe. Nor, frankly, was this speech a useful guide to the administration’s legislative plans for the coming year. Since the mid-term elections of November 2010, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives has blocked most of the Democrats’ legislation, and will continue to do so, which means that the president’s plans count for little. To be understood, this speech needs to be seen for what it was: an audition for re-election.


Measured by that standard, how did he do? A president asking voters for four more years cannot just promise jam tomorrow. Since the Republicans want to make the coming election a referendum on his performance, Mr Obama has to brag about what he has already done. So, cloaked in praise for the armed services, he book-ended his speech with reminders that it was he who ordered the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He called his controversial decision to bail out Detroit’s car industry a “bet on American ingenuity” that had put General Motors “back on top as the world’s number one”. He claimed (this is a stretch) that his reform of banking regulation meant that taxpayers would never again have to bail out a financial institution too big to fail. And, recognising that millions of voters still fume about the bail-outs, he said he was creating a special team of prosecutors to track down and punish those responsible for the abusive lending that pumped up the housing bubble and led to the crash of 2008.

Nice try. Mr Obama’s problem is that Americans simply do not believe these good tidings. More than 48% of them disapprove of the way he is doing his job. More than 65% believe that the country is on the “wrong track”. To stand a chance of re-election, he must therefore do whatever he can to frame the vote less as a referendum on his performance in office and more as a choice between competing visions for the future. This speech confirmed that the main contrast he intends to draw with the Republicans is that he stands for “fairness”. A strategy like this entails a risk. Despite the ruckus of those who claim to represent the 99%, Americans believe in opportunity, not equality-mongering. And although fairness is a less provocative word than “equality”, his opponents have already identified it with “class warfare”.
Mr Obama told Congress that it was not “class warfare” to expect a billionaire to pay at least the same tax rate as his secretary, the rule proposed by Warren Buffett, the investment guru and sage of Omaha. The president now says that anyone making more than $1m a year should pay at least 30% in taxes. By the grace of God (or the machinations of Newt Gingrich), Mr Obama gave his speech on the very day that Mitt Romney, still his likeliest Republican opponent in November, felt compelled at last to publish his most recent tax returns, showing that the founder of Bain Capital earned $42.5m in the past two years but (since these were mainly capital gains) was taxed at a rate of less than 15%. If Mr Romney becomes the Republican nominee his wealth, and the way he earned it, could damage him in the general election, just as it has in his own party’s primaries.
After defending his record and setting up a contrast with his opponents, a president up for re-election must immunise himself against the other party’s attack lines. The Republicans accuse Mr Obama of apologising for America and accepting its decline, so he said its standing had never been higher and it remained “the one indispensable nation”. The Republicans say he is blocking the exploitation of the country’s energy resources, so he promised more exploitation of offshore oil and gas and called for new tax credits for clean energy. Mr Romney accuses China of currency manipulation, so he is creating an “enforcement unit” to police “unfair trading practices”. And so forth.
A first term ending in a whimper
In all these ways, Mr Obama’s speech can be defended as a workmanlike attempt to sum up his achievements and set out his stall for November. And yet it was in some ways also profoundly dispiriting. Health-insurance reform was barely mentioned, an acknowledgment that the vast piece of social legislation Mr Obama once saw as his greatest domestic achievement has so far fallen flat with voters. The president implied falsely once again that squeezing the rich was the key to taming the deficit, instead of admitting that returning the public finances to a sustainable path will require higher taxes all round and painful reforms of health and pension entitlements. His talk about reversing the flow of manufacturing jobs abroad brought to mind the words “King” and “Canute”.
In a wistful passage at the end of his speech, Mr Obama reflected on the trust and teamwork that enabled the Navy’s SEALs to kill bin Laden, inviting his audience to imagine how strong the union would be if America as a whole could demonstrate similar common purpose. This is the fantasy of many a president. They deploy untold power and enjoy total obedience as commanders-in-chief, but in the civilian domain are checked and balanced at every turn by a fractious polity. It is not all Mr Obama’s fault that the parties have seldom been more divided than they have been on his watch. But he entered the White House promising to rise above partisanship. To judge by this speech, there will not be much of that in this election year.