State of the Union Reaction

These are the “things the Republican Party could not bring themselves to clap for tonight, a (much) condensed list:”

An improving economy
A soaring stock market
Americans getting health insurance
Mention of “solar power”
Tax cuts for working families (A tax cut Republicans don’t like?)”
Affordable childcare
Tax cuts for families with children (Another one?)
Equal pay for women
“America has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and all advanced economies combined.”
A “free and open internet”
Rewarding companies that “invest in America” (C’mon, really?)
“Working Americans”
A resolution for the use of the force against ISIL
“Trying something new” with Cuba
Acknowledging that climate change exists
Prohibiting Torture
Not persecuting “people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”
Closing Gitmo
Making “voting easier for every single American”

The Drop Mic Moment:

Look at Boehner. He winches at the President’s comeback to the Republican’s disrespect, because he knows a three pointer was just dropped on his head.

But I think my favorite passage is this:

“I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists that we don’t have enough information to act,” Obama said. “Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But you know what — I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities. And the best scientists in the world are all telling us that our activities are changing the climate.”

It was always the easiest comeback to the GOP’s grand plan to divert questions about climate change by saying they “were not scientists.”

Another favorite moment:

President Obama: “Of course, nothing helps families make ends meet like higher wages. That’s why this Congress still needs to pass a law that makes sure a woman is paid the same as a man for doing the same work. Really. It’s 2015. It’s time. We still need to make sure employees get the overtime they’ve earned. And to everyone in this Congress who still refuses to raise the minimum wage, I say this: If you truly believe you could work full-time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it.”

That should be a law: if you are against raising the minimum wage, then you are forced to live on it for a year.

I like an in your face Obama:

At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious; that we would crush jobs and explode deficits. Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years.

So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works. And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don’t get in the way. We can’t slow down businesses or put our economy at risk with government shutdowns or fiscal showdowns. We can’t put the security of families at risk by taking away their health insurance, or unraveling the new rules on Wall Street, or refighting past battles on immigration when we’ve got a system to fix. And if a bill comes to my desk that tries to do any of these things, it will earn my veto.

Brian Beutler contends that Obama is “priming the public for [Clinton’s] campaign” by “building a case before the public that Democrats have had better economic ideas all along”:

Tuesday’s State of the Union was thus a single component of a project that’s much more meaningful than budget brinksmanship or the 2016 campaign—to establish the parameters of the economic debate for years and years, the way Ronald Reagan’s presidency lent supply-side tax policy and deregulation a presumption of efficacy that shaped not just Republican, but Democratic policy for two decades.

Seven years into Obama’s presidency, the U.S. economy is finally growing rapidly enough to boost his popularity and to sell the country on the idea that Obama’s peculiar brand of ostentatious incrementalism—building out and improving existing institutions, directing resources through them to the middle class—has worked, and should serve as a beacon not just for liberals, but for conservatives aspiring to recapture the presidency.

Chris Cillizza: “For his allies and even many liberals who had grown sour on him, it was a triumphant speech in which both his own soaring confidence and his dismissal of his political rivals was fitting and appropriate. For his detractors, the speech was everything they loathe about him: cocky, combative and forever campaigning. Regardless of where you land on that confident-to-cocky spectrum, one thing was very clear tonight: Obama isn’t planning to go quietly over his final two years in office. Not quietly at all.”

Jim Tankersley argues that some of Obama’s proposals have real promise:

Many economists say the preferential treatment for capital income has led to the excessive growth of Wall Street, which has robbed the broader economy of precious brainpower that would be better employed solving human problems and creating more high-paying jobs. This could eventually prove to be the key difference in Obama’s latest middle-class plan, compared to his past plans – a difference in policy and in politics. If you talk to American workers much, you find that, sure, they’d enjoy paying less money to the government. But mostly, they’d like a better-paying job.

Annie Lowrey: “Tonight, we saw an Obama like the one we saw on the campaign trail – fired up, optimistic, discursive, happy-hearted, and historical. Tonight, we saw an Obama who decried Washington, but still seemed convinced in hope and change. Tonight, we saw Obama thunder, trumpet, and staccato-shout his policies, despite the nonexistent odds they have of passage. And the fact that the economy has turned around so much seemed to give him hope that the middle class would start feeling better, even if Washington never helps.”

Josh Marshall: “As Sahil Kapur explains, based on conversations with White House aides, President Obama wanted to be a Ronald Reagan of the Center-Left in tonight’s speech, not so much focused on passing laws in the next two years (which isn’t happening regardless) as embedding a clear blueprint of progressive activism into the structure and rhetoric of American politics for years or decades to come. So he’ll make his arguments, cheer successes and vindicated predictions and promises, take aggressive executive actions to the limits of his authority. But more than anything else he’ll try to push the whole package, the logic of his administration and his policies as a touch point and reference for the future. He was talking over and past the new GOP majorities on many, many levels.”

Jonathan Chait: “Republicans have formulated plans to benefit working-class Americans directly, but all these plans have foundered on the problem that Republicans have no way to pay for them… Thus the blunt quality of Obama’s plan: he will cut taxes for the working- and middle-class by raising an equal amount from wealthy heirs and investors. Obama’s plan is not going to pass Congress, of course. Probably nothing serious can pass a Congress that still has no political or ideological incentive to cooperate with the president. The point is not to pass a law. It is to lay out openly the actual trade-offs involved.”

Andrew Sullivan: “This is a speech that revealed to us the president we might have had without the extraordinary crises – foreign and domestic – he inherited. I’ve always believed in his long game and in his bent toward pragmatism over ideology. Events can still upend things, but this is a president very much shaping the agenda past his own legacy. He’s showing Hillary Clinton the way, and has the midterms to point to as the result of the defensive crouch. If his standing improves still further, he will box her in, and she’ll have to decide if she’s going to be a Wall Street tool and proto-neocon or a more populist and confident middle class agenda-setter. One of his best. And for the first time in his six years, he has the economic winds behind him.”