If you watched Barack Obama’s State of the Union (SOTU) speech Tuesday night (Wednesday morning in Europe), you learned some surprising things. According to Obama:
- Lots of people are getting jobs in America.
- Millions of Americans have signed up to get health care.
- The United States no longer depends significantly on foreign oil.
- The US government is doing something about climate change.
- Relations with Europe have never been better.
These statements, worded carefully in the speech and paraphrased here, are true in certain ways and in certain contexts. However, in order to paint such a rosy picture, they make use of very selective information.
For example, most of the millions who signed up for health care signed up through an existing program. Many of the rest signed up for the government’s new program, popularly known as Obamacare, because their old policies were canceled under the new, stricter standards, or because the law required them to.
The overall message is correct, however — that the economy is improving, the government is spending not quite as much money, more energy is being produced locally and so on. Seven years into the Second Great Depression, things are finally looking up. Prosperity is just around the corner, and Americans can be optimistic again.
Crucial points
It was crucial for Obama to make this point, because the last year was really a disaster for him.
• 2013 was the first year of Obama’s second term as president. As usually happens, a lot of key individuals retired and a lot of replacements had to be nominated by the president and confirmed by Congress. Congress, however, delayed many of the nominations for months.
• A lot of effort spent trying to change America’s gun laws after the mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012 got no results whatsoever.
• Unable to get Congress to cooperate on anything of significance, Obama — like his predecessors — issued numerous presidential directives in order to work around the Congress. He said in the SOTU that he’d do more of this, as he sees such action as an effort to get things done. His adversaries portray it as undermining the power of the Congress.
• Information about secret US surveillance programs, made public by Edward Snowden, embarrassed Obama’s government, caused its allies to mistrust the United States, riled many of its citizens and forced months-long investigations by both Congress and the White House. The consensus at the end was that the Obama administration had been even more secretive and authoritarian than the George W. Bush administration, and that reform is necessary.
• Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry, were all set to go to war in Syria until Kerry’s unscripted response to an unexpected question gave Russia a way to propose peace. Those who have been saying that Obama’s entire foreign policy is misguided and chaotic felt vindicated.
• Obama’s one major accomplishment has been the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) — but when the time came for the millions of uninsured to sign up, the website didn’t work properly. During the months it took to sort this out, the Obama administration loosened requirements and extended deadlines, looking autocratic and unprofessional the whole time.
• Congress has not passed a single budget that Obama has sent it during his entire presidency. The two-week partial shutdown of federal government services last fall, done in protest of Obamacare, backfired on the Republicans, but again it created the impression that the inmates were loose at the asylum and that no one was really running things.
• A lengthy investigation into the murder of four American embassy staff in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, recently concluded that the US should have known it was too risky to operate an embassy there. Republicans have been trying for over a year to turn this example of bad judgment into a major scandal.
Currently, 43 percent of Americans approve of the way Obama is doing his job. Fifty percent disapprove.
The response
Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers from Washington state gave the 10-minute Republican response to the president’s hour-long speech. Instead of offering a rebuttal, she talked in general terms about working to increase opportunity, fairness, dignity, education, and employment, and to enact immigration reform.
Certain of her details warrant some correction. The government does not make health-care choices for individuals; government spending has not hurt people; and Obama lowered taxes, not raised them, on all but the richest Americans.
Overall, though, Rodgers’ speech was remarkable for its positive tone, for example in talking about her son, Cole, who has Down’s syndrome. “The doctors … told us all the problems. … We saw only possibilities.” The boy, she says, is a terrific brother to his older sisters, and reads better than other children his age. “We see all the things he can do, not those he can’t.” By analogy, she said, we must all try to look on the bright side and work toward solutions.
This message of optimism, of trying to make the country a better place for ordinary people, was not very different from Obama’s.
This spring, candidates will start preparing for the next Congressional election. When that date comes in November, we’ll know which side’s optimism carried the day.
