Prom night at the Capitol with everyone wearing ribbons in support of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and Republicans and Democrats sitting side-by-side in a show of the most faux bipartisanship in recent memory was more enchanting for the punditry than it was for most Americans who actually listened to what President Obama said in his 61 minute speech.
Most of us have come to expect good speech from Obama. We didn’t get that from the State of the Union speech, which was arguably the most lackluster and uninventive of Obama’s loquacious career.
Here’s what wasn’t in the speech: No mention of the massive housing foreclosure crisis which is currently impacting one in 30 Americans who own houses. One in 30. That includes people who are actually in foreclosure or who are on the verge of foreclosure or are more than two payments behind on their mortgages.
No mention, either, of the millions of Americans–one in ten—who are unemployed. To hear the President tell it, the “recovery” is firmly in place because the stock market is cresting near 12,000 again.
Of course what Obama neglects to mention here is that one of the reasons the stock market is doing so well is because of all the cash his administration funneled into Wall Street at the expense of average Americans. Many of the top 500 S&P companies are indeed showing record profits. Alas, they aren’t hiring.
So what about Main Street, Mr. President? We were told in the last SOTU that the bailouts were to jump start hiring and pump up the economy. But unemployment—not mentioned in this SOTU address–is still hovering close to ten percent with an additional 15 million or so people falling into the category of 99ers. These are the people who have been unemployed for 99 weeks or more and thus are no longer eligible for unemployment benefits and are not counted in the unemployment numbers since those only include people collecting benefits. Which also means self-employed people who have lost work are also not included–these would include consultants and freelance writers and artists, among others.
The poor were also not mentioned in the speech. But then the poor routinely get forgotten when the economy is bad, which it is, despite the President’s platitudes to the contrary.
The President did, however, state that he was instituting a five year freeze on all non-defense discretionary spending–which will, of course, impact the poor and working class most directly. That no economist thinks this will do anything to help the economy but is merely a sop to the Republicans doesn’t seem to matter.
Depressing wages to improve profits is not the answer to the economic quandaries facing the nation. Nor, as the President seemed to imply with his excoriation of bad teachers and bad schools, is the fact that America ranks so low in the international educational spectrum. We didn’t get where we are because of some bad students. We got where we are through a Wall Street shell game perpetrated by the best and the brightest, not the dumb and dumber.
A few days prior to the SOTU, I received an email from Vice President Joe Biden via Obama’s website. In it the VP touted all the things that he and Obama assert the Administration has accomplished in the past two years. It was quite the letter.
Where the SOTU speech was lackluster, this email was hyperbolic. Among the rather outrageous assertions was the claim that “people say this Administation has accomplished more than Roosevelt’s.” Biden doesn’t say which Roosevelt, although it can be presumed he meant FDR, not Teddy. But either would be such an exaggeration as to at the very least raise an eyebrow, or in my case, raise a point-by-point refutation letter that I sent off immediately. Who exactly is saying this other than the Vice President and other Obama staffers?
One of the features of the SOTU was commentary on how well the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have gone. According to the President, it’s all gone very well. But what exactly did we achieve in Iraq? Can anyone explain that with any facility or clarity? And the war in Afghanistan has gone on for a decade and we appear to be no closer to “winning” that war than we were the day we invaded. The country is still run by a corrupt and largely ineffective government, many of the outlying districts are controlled by warlords or the Taliban or al-Qeada, the role of women is severely restricted in the nation, opium remains the one main growth industry in the country and poverty and illiteracy are pandemic.
Obama lauded the troops toward the end of his speech, but he didn’t mention how many have lost their lives to these two failed wars, nor how many tens of thousands of others are permanently disabled nor how many others still are mentailly ill with PTSD and other post-war stress. There was no mention of the high rate of suicide among returning soldiers nor the escalating levels of domestic violence among those personnel.
In the email from Biden, the Vice President asserted that 100,000 troops had been brought back from Iraq. Yet at the height of the war there were only 92,000 troops there according to the Pentagon, which presumably knows—and between 50,000 and 60,000 still remain there. In the SOTU, Obama insisted that troops would begin to be drawn down in Afghanistan in July, which garnered rousing applause from Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), one of the President’s chief critics on Afghanistan. But what will that draw-down actually entail? And will it be more fudging of the numbers like Biden’s claim regarding the 100,000 troop withdrawal from Iraq?
The President also claimed credit for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the SOTU, even though he spent the last two years thwarting every court ruling that attempted to overturn DADT. And in mentioning gay soldiers (lesbian military personnel have been discharged from the military at a rate of 3 to 1 for every gay man discharged, but were not mentioned), Obama was quick to assert that gays should go to their local ROTC and sign up post haste.
The President also lauded his health care initiatives and in one of the only jabs at the Republicans, suggested that no one wants to overturn the progressive moves instituted by the Health Care Reform Act. Using a man with cancer as a prop, Obama singled him out and the cameras panned to his chemo-bald head as the President explained that thanks to the HCRA, this man would no longer have to worry about his pre-existing condition interfering with his health insurance.
But there was no mention of the 42 million Americans who still do not have health insurance or the 18 million others who are underinsured. Nor was there mention of the fact that HCRA failed to cap premiums and as a consequence insurance companies have escalated premiums at exorbitant levels over the past few months. In California the average premium increase has been a whopping 59 percent while in New Jersey it has been 38 percent and in Pennsylvania 18 percent.
Yes, most Americans who are actually looking at what health care reform achieved are grateful for some of the changes, but they still don’t have anything like the comprehensive health care that Canadians or Europeans have. Or the President, VP and Congress.
And despite the call for unity and civility that the President began in Tucson two weeks ago, there was no follow-up on the issue of gun violence nor even on the fact that one in five Americans suffers from some form of mental illness and there is woefully little help available out there for people like the obviously mentally ill Tucson shooter.
Obama went hard for a solidly platitudinous wrap up to his speech, intoning again and again that America does big things: We do big things was repeated several times.
But what exactly are those big things?
The Obama Administration could have done big things from the outset, particularly given the wave of international support and good-will that Obama himself enjoyed at the beginning of his presidency. But at every turn Obama has catered to special interests and to the Republican oligarchy.
America has done big things in the past, and as a consequence of some of those things, we have our first black president. But we have done no big things under Obama, unless whittling away at civil liberties with the abandon this president has shown is what we’re considering.
In one of the many commentaries by pundits post-SOTU, conservative money guru Ben Stein presented a fascinating editorial. Stein liked the SOTU because he found it redolent of Reagan with a soupcon of Bush 1 and a heavy air of Bush 2. He thought Obama was finally getting it–by which Stein means getting the conservative message.
Stein illumined point-by-point what a good Republican Obama has become—something I’ve been saying for two years now. He enumerated all the ways Obama has agreed with Reagan and the Bushes. And he also asserted that Obama is currently the most facile of all Republican voices in America and as such should run on the Republican ticket come 2012.
It was an intriguing argument and one no progressive should ignore.
The SOTU was definitely not the state of my union. Ben Stein may think Obama gets it, but then he and Obama have the same politics—pro-business, pro-wealth, anti-anyone making under $250,000 a year.
The SOTU should be a wake up call for liberals, progressives and old school Democrats as to who Mr. Obama currently is. This is not the guy to lead us into a progressive future where America does big things. This is a guy who will continue to sell us out to the Republicans and to Wall Street and to Big Business while unemployment remains at nearly ten percent and the rich–which Mr. Obama is himself—get richer on the backs of the poor, working class and middle class.
Where will the SOTU be next year, a few months before the election and days before Iowa? It’s anybody’s guess, but mine is we will still be in Afghanistan, we will still have no comprehensive health care reforms, we will still have a national hiring freeze on, we will still have massive unemployment and underemployment as well as foreclosures right and left and our civil liberties will still be being whittled away one warrantless wiretap at a time.
If we want to continue to do big things, we need a leader who can get us where we need to go. So far President Obama has not shown himself to be that leader. And nothing in his SOTU speech said he ever will be.—VAB
