Mark Halperin’s take on the State of the Union speech was pretty typical of the Beltway pundit crew.
The president delivers a boffo performance…
…Obama’s presentation was close to flawless: upbeat and animated, leisurely and assured, surprisingly engaging even when he lapsed into the professorial mode he favors over tub-thumping…
…For the tens of millions of Americans who want Beltway residents to get along and get things done, it was the apex of bipartisan promise since the aftermath of September 11, 2001.
The bipartisan dating seating arrangements defused any sign of dissent, although the president provided precious little cause for anger. CNN (84%) and CBS (91%) found enormous levels of support for the president’s proposals.
I don’t agree that the president’s central message, ‘the future is ours to win,’ was ‘hackneyed. It was on point. Much like Amy Chua, Obama’s vision is ‘excellence,’ and he wants us to warm to the challenge.
So yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real. But this shouldn’t discourage us. It should challenge us…
We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit, and reform our government. That’s how our people will prosper. That’s how we’ll win the future. And tonight, I’d like to talk about how we get there.
The president knows that we’re becoming a nation more interested in gaming than in learning the hard sciences or pushing ourselves to be the best. We’re soft and, increasingly, we’re undereducated. We’re falling behind. And if we’re going to avoid watching India, China, Brazil and others become the preeminent nations in the world, we’re going to have to do something radical. Obama thinks that developing clean ‘new’ energy technologies is our path to excellence. And he went directly after ‘old’ energy.
We’re issuing a challenge. We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time…
…We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own. So instead of subsidizing yesterday’s energy, let’s invest in tomorrow’s.
This is what Obama termed our ‘Sputnik moment,’ referring to the first space satellite launched by the Soviets in 1957. Less than nine months later, Congress reacted by creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Eleven years after that, we were walking on the Moon. We are going to have to have similar investment and commonality of purpose to reach Obama’s high expectations.
Now, clean energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they’re selling. So tonight, I challenge you to join me in setting a new goal: by 2035, 80% of America’s electricity will come from clean energy sources
That should be music to all Americans’ ears, but it is probably a terrifying vision in oil and coal country.
Obama is definitely more JFK than RFK, but that’s okay. Unlike JFK, Obama actually gets shit done. The Republicans can keep talking about the hallucinations they had over the last two years, but the president’s plan is more in keeping with the American Spirit. We need common purposes and we need big projects. And we need those things outside of the context of war. Let’s get to work, right?
Of course, a good or even great speech is nice. But then we come back down to Earth and realize that no matter how well received, the president’s proposals are not Mitch McConnell’s proposals. They are not John Boehner’s proposals. So, last night will be the last we hear of them unless something changes.
For those who wanted the president to provide some vision, now you got it. Not bad, eh? He understands the big picture.
We’re soft and, increasingly, we’re undereducated.
Soft? You bet!! Being a Philly guy, did you know that Steve Carlton was one of the last baseball pitchers to throw 300 innings in a season? Anyway, I agree with you about being soft, but that seems to come with an advanced economy. Undereducated? In what way? We are graduating more college graduates than ever. Or do you mean undereducated in that people are dumb enough to fall for the BS that Faux Noise and the Teahadists drum up? Because that part is true.
No, we’re falling back in our education levels.
in Philadelphia, more than 52% of adults read at or below the level of a ten year old.
How is Obama going to get all that investment in infrastructure stuff done when he’s freezing domestic spending for 5 years?
How is Obama going to get all that money with a Republican House?
Listen again to his speech and you’ll see where some of the money could come from. I believe he made that pretty clear.
please point out to me what he said. I didn’t watch it. Joan Walsh raised the question about the clash between “spending freeze” and “investments” in a column today.
I honestly haven’t paid much attention since before 12/23/2010, when my kid came for a visit. I’m much happier this way.
It’s stagnating on a plateau rather than rising as other countries are. Notice that the college graduates in their 40’s aren’t much different than in their 20’s.
What do you expect from a country whose job market has basically stagnated over the past 10 years? People can’t afford college and not all those that can are finding decent jobs.
From Halperin:
..and I agree. This is one of the two big takeaways for me.
First, that the Pres now sounds like the civil and bipartisan man he has always been and that the R’s attack him viciously at their electoral peril, and
Second, that Obama has claimed the mantle of cost-conscious government reformer. Especially if he gets his “reorganization of government” passed, the R’s are in big trouble. He will have achieved more of their goals than they could, all while accomplishing his objective of restoring some faith in the federal government.
Good strategy, good speech. Score it a win.
He could restore more if a program like HAMP actually worked.
Well as long as we’re citing Beltway Villagers, let me second one Joe Scarborough on NBC who found it a rather uninspiring speech that apparently elicited an unusual, tepid response in the House chamber.
Some polite applause from me for the nice rhetoric about high-speed rail and improving our infrastructure, ideas that are only about 40 years overdue. We’ll see about O’s actual follow-up, and whether this is a real priority or just empty talk for the base.
A little more uncertain polite applause re O’s clean energy proposal, since he includes in “clean” energy things like “clean coal” and nuclear. This after all is the president who just a few weeks before the BP oil spill said that modern technology had made major spills very unlikely.
Finally,
what’s with the JFK bashing, Boo? JFK did plenty for the brief time he was given, both in the positive and negative sense (not sending combat troops either to Laos or VN). He kept the peace while presiding over a strong economy. Then he inspired millions, especially the young, with his strong, charismatic leadership to channel their idealism and go to work for govt to help others.
Obama so far can’t hold a candle to JFK’s ability to tap youthful energy — O’s many young voters from 2008 instead are rather dispirited and (rightfully) gloomy about the economy and a sense that their guy from 2008 has been very disappointing.
Imo, JFK went for the gold and governed in bold strokes, but just didn’t live to see it all enacted, as it most certainly would have been had he lived. Obama so far has gone for the bronze. Bronze is nice, but it’s only worth polite applause.
Brodie, Booman can speak for himself, but I didn’t take his comments as JFK bashing. JFK, whatever his private misgivings, continued to move the US along the path to full-scale war in Vietnam. For the most part, he did as little as necessary on civil rights—because he needed the political support of Southern Democrats in Congress.
Obviously your mileage may vary, but I think there’s a good chance we’ll look back on last year’s Affordable Care Act as the most significant piece of progressive domestic legislation since 1965—and more significant than any domestic legislation passed during JFK’s administration. I think it’s more accurate to say that JFK campaigned in gold and governed in bronze. (Note: both get you on the medal stand, so it’s not a knock on him.)
As for young voters, they turned out last fall in the numbers I would have expected for an off-year election—which is to say they turned out in small numbers. Current polling shows they still support Obama more than older voters. If young voters turn out in 2012 in percentages close to what they did in 2008, then that’s a real problem for Republicans—especially because there will be about 16 million new eligible voters (age 18-21).
Obviously your mileage may vary, but I think there’s a good chance we’ll look back on last year’s Affordable Care Act as the most significant piece of progressive domestic legislation since 1965—and more significant than any domestic legislation passed during JFK’s administration.
And do you realize how sad that is? That the legislation was basically trumpted by the Heritage Foundation in the 1990’s.
Who cares who USED to like it. The opposition to kill it NOW is staggering. What? these guys secretly like the plan? What an absurd way to measure the effectiveness of legislation.
Quite a bit just plain wrong here
On VN, clearly the now documented record (NSAM 263, Oct ’63) shows JFK not only deciding not to send in combat troops, but deciding on a withdrawal path, the first 1k advisers to come out by Dec 63, all by the end of 1965 — after he was safely re-elected. (see John Newman’s fine book, JFK and Vietnam, David Kaiser’s American Tragedy, and James Douglass’ recent excellent work, JFK and the Unspeakable).
Re civil rights, it’s an odd way to do as “little as necessary” by introducing, as JFK did in June ’63, the most substantive CR bill since Reconstruction. And in so doing, contrary to your incorrect assertion about southern Dems, he knew he would be alienating a part of his party which constituted part of his electoral base in 1960. So, in fact, what Kennedy did was quite politically bold as it might put into jeopardy, at least from an electoral vote pov, his staying in office for a second term.
As for “governing in bronze”, hardly, when one considers the importance of such major ventures as the space program to the moon, the bold promise of the Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress, major FP decisions of essentially no war for the US in Laos and VN, the bold and courageous management during the Missile Crisis and the year before in Berlin, plus getting the ball rolling on major domestic bills like civil rights and Medicare.
I don’t see many half-hearted half-measure incremental achievements in that list, considered both in terms of what was positively sought or achieved, and in terms of crises and wars averted. And in some of the FP areas, he had to boldly confront and deny the wishes of a rather reckless and hawkish FP/military/congressional establishment.
As for Obama and youth, there just isn’t the same considerable positive feeling there they once had for Obama. And it’s no wonder given the grim job situation people in their 20s face, and the fact that O hasn’t quite acted aggressively enough all along to turn the economic tide. Of course O still has more than a year to act boldly in this area, and thereby get back some of the enthusiasm of his 2008 liberal base. But I’m very skeptical he’ll act as more than just a bland bipartisan-sounding incremental centrist from now until re-election, going for the bronze.
Nuclear must be in the equation to combat climate change. It’s a must.
James Hansen agrees:
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He takes questions at the end regarding nuclear.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgC8yZT–0A&feature=related
For me it’s not a matter of whether nuclear “must be in the equation” but a practical recognition that it’s inevitably going to be, especially with this current centrist and corporatist Dem admin bringing in a former CEO of GE, a company which has been in the business of building nuclear reactors.
But Hansen isn’t the only environmental scientist out there, and not all of them are on board with nuclear. Nor are all enviro activists, such as Al Gore, once a proponent, now increasingly skeptical about nuclear for a variety of reasons.
With Obama and his group of big corp-friendly economic advisers, it becomes now a matter of what percentage nuclear will have in his new energy proposal — a small token amount in terms of dollars spent, or a huge beast that sucks up the funding and keeps solar and wind as secondary or tertiary approaches.
I’ve yet to see a reasonable assessment of how we meet our current energy needs without nuclear. The math isn’t there. I’m in the process of developing new wind turbines, and right now they’re pie in the sky ideas, but even if they could be implemented as we want them right now, they still couldn’t account for the energy we need.
. . more JFK than RFK . .
. . . when we need someone like Huey Long:
I will not participate in the Democratic victory tonight. I do not care for my share in a victory that means that the poor and the downtrodden, the blind, the helpless, the orphaned, the bleeding, the wounded, the hungry, and the distressed will be the victims.”
— Huey Long on President Roosevelt’s threatened veto of the Veterans Bonus (Williams p. 636)
Huh? Obama offered ideas and solutions to help all of those people.
Plus Huey Long’s legacy is far more mixed than that T. Harry Williams’ biography would lead you to believe….
JFK’s rather pointless moon landing mission inspired people because it was one concrete, measurable, spectacular goal, and because it was pushback against the bogus “cold war” frame. Obama’s aversion to “drama” tends to deprive him of the kind of response JFK got because the energy program he describes has to focus on incremental, diffused progress.
If he wants to rally Americans around his laudable goals, he has to come up with something more than some numbers creeping up. He needs a moon landing, the fall of the Berlin wall, the birth of Social Security — something you can see and grasp. The conversion of a city to full renewable energy, for example, or actually getting some high-speed rail built and running, or getting the Smart grid working for at least one region. And involving people in its progress. It’s past time for the great campaign communicator to figure out how to communicate as the chief executive.
Well I wouldn’t characterize it as “pointless” — there were practical and political aspects to it, none of which were pointless or unimportant. Thousands of jobs generated towards a positive non-war national goal which united Americans and also added to a positive image for us abroad. Then all the technical achievements, plus the fulfillment of man’s need to explore and seek answers to questions about the universe.
All that plus the non-pointless point that Kennedy actually wanted to do it all by cooperating in a joint venture with the Soviets to the Moon. Imagine what that — combined with a nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which came later — would have done to fairly quickly ending the Cold War had Khrushchev accepted Kennedy’s offer at Vienna. As it turns out, according to one author and Khrushchev’s son Sergei, K may well have finally agreed in the final weeks of JFK’s presidency, and I believe one JFK pres’l document tends to confirm this.
I think its immediate purpose was pretty much pointless — what difference did it make if Americans landed on the moon or not? As many argued at the time, all that money and effort could have been spent on practical remedies for huge problems in food, housing, poverty, and education. But that was missing the point — this was a concrete goal that everyone could watch, measure, and somehow feel part of. Its real purpose was political theater that was used to sell the side effects that you list.
What I’m trying to say is that Obama needs that kind of theater — just setting rational goals is only half the battle. Maybe another way to see it is that he needs to give us concrete plans that bring his goals down to earth and let Americans have something to root for. Having some number turn over to 80% or whatever some decades from now is just not enough.
We’ll have to disagree about the point or pointlessness of the moon effort (as you make the JK Galbraith argument), but my point was it was a bold proposal — Kennedy going for the gold, and with a dramatically almost absurd specific goal-date that just rocked the NASA head honchos back on their heels.
Agree about Obama’s more modest and vaguer (re some specifics) long-term proposal, which shoots for the bronze. Much easier for people to think about the future just a decade or less ahead, but a quarter century or more … our eyes glaze over and it’s hard to wrap the mind around it. And the getting to that 80% — will it be primarily through new ways with old, boring or dangerous sources like clean coal and nuclear, with solar and wind or similar just a small piece of the pie?
And in any case a new cleaner energy program — 80% worth — just isn’t nearly as sexy as setting a nat’l goal of landing a man on the moon for the first time, especially in the context of a close race with a dreaded political enemy. Although setting a clear goal of building a nat’l high-speed rail system w/n the next 15 yrs covering all major urban centers in the US, would have qualified as JFKesque.
But, imo, it’s all a reflection of the bipartisan-seeking, moderate and incrementalist character of the man who now occupies the WH. He is who he is, some of us are finding out and having to deal with. He’s just not that into bold ventures and seems content settling for the bronze.