Reports came in last night that President Obama’s State of the Union address got really high marks. Quick polls from CBS and CNN showed approval ratings of 92% and 88%, respectively. E.J. Dionne explains what Obama accomplished with the speech.
Some speeches hit you over the head with their main points, and absolutely no one could miss the fact that “win the future” was the central theme of President Obama’s State of the Union Address. It was a smart speech aimed at scrambling the political debate, reassuring Americans that we can overcome challenges to our economic power, and redefining the political center.
It was also a bold defense of government’s role in spurring innovation, supporting research, and promoting education. Obama wants the debate to be between practical, efficient, forward-looking government and diminutive, unambitious government. For progressives, that sure beats the big versus small government argument.
Joan Walsh captures the essence of the GOP responses. Both were two sides of the same dishonest coin – whitewashing the GOP’s involvement in creating the debt they now rail against and short on specifics.
The president was lucky to have not one but two GOP rebuttals, and they were equally strange and dishonest. Rep. Paul Ryan railed against the deficit without proposing even one specific cut. He didn’t talk about his own infamous “Roadmap,” maybe because most analysts have called it a budget buster, even though it essentially replaces Social Security and Medicare with vouchers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates Ryan’s plan wouldn’t balance the budget until 2063, and would add $62 trillion to the debt by then. Citizens for Tax Justice said Ryan’s Roadmap raises taxes on 9 out of 10 taxpayers and while slashing them for the wealthiest.
Wisely, Ryan talked about none of that. He promised to repeal “Obamacare” and replace it with “fiscally responsible patient-centered reform,” but didn’t say word one about what it would entail. Most dishonestly, Ryan said Democrats had overspent “to the point where the president is now urging Congress to increase the debt limit,” ignoring the fact that Congress raised it seven times under President Bush. That’s your new chair of the House Budget Committee. (Update: Somehow I missed the best line in Ryan’s rebuttal, in which he worries we’re headed toward “a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.” I want to ask the 14.5 million unemployed Americans, and the millions more who are underemployed, how they’re enjoying their hammocks. Leave it to a Republican to come up with such vivid metaphors of leisure to talk about suffering. It’s the only way they can relate.)
Tea Party leader Michele Bachmann followed Ryan, and CNN chose to broadcast her talk while other networks didn’t. Bachmann has actually proposed budget cuts – eradicating the Department of Education and saving money (?) by repealing the Dodd-Frank Financial Regulation act. But she didn’t talk specifics in her SOTU rebuttal, either. Luckily, she didn’t get into American history, after her disastrous Iowa speech sugarcoating slavery and otherwise distorting the American past. (Note to Bachmann: George Jefferson was definitely not one of the founders.) She flashed Perot-style charts blaming rising unemployment solely on Obama, and ranted about 16,500 new IRS agents supposedly hired to enforce Obamacare (Factcheck.org has already debunked that myth).
Bachmann ended with a shot of soldiers raising the flag at Iwo Jima (which she mispronounced) and compared it to Americans fighting the debt crisis. “We will proclaim liberty throughout the land,” she concluded. “We the people will never give up.” Unfortunately, she was looking at the wrong camera for the entire speech, so she always seemed to be looking over the viewer’s left shoulder (in my case, at my dog Sadie.) It was a little creepy.
Sadly, we don’t expect anything different from the GOP. Debt is an issue the U.S. will have to deal with at some point, but right now we don’t have two parties willing to govern.