Saturday Open Thread [1.24.15]
First Read: “Maybe the best way to view President Obama’s confident and ambitious State of the Union address last night was him handing the political baton back to his party — and likely Hillary Clinton — essentially telling them: ‘Here are the issues worth fighting for in the coming years.’ Paid sick/maternity leave. Free tuition for qualified community college students. More investment in America’s infrastructure. Tax cuts for the middle class. And, of course, higher taxes for the wealthy to pay for all of these things.”
“Unlike in past State of the Union addresses and other speeches, Obama didn’t call on congressional Republicans to meet him halfway on certain issues. He didn’t latch on to certain GOP proposals. And he certainly didn’t acknowledge his party’s big defeat in last November’s midterm election. Instead, he focused on the future — the future campaigns and the future legislative fights; it felt like the leader of a party laying out a platform. The chief reason why: As we’ve seen over the past four years, there isn’t much hope in divided government being able to accomplish big things, let alone the little ones. But it was still jarring, because his State of the Union sounded more like one a president gives in a campaign year, not one right after an election (especially an election your party just lost).”
That is from a CNN poll conducted the night of the speech.
GOP pollster Neil Newhouse translates President Obama’s State of the Union address:
“You won nothing in November. The 2014 election had no consequences for my Administration whatsoever. You may have beaten my party and members of my team in the mid-term elections, but you’ve never beaten me. And, now you never will. All this talk about compromise and working together means you do what I want, because I’m not meeting you halfway on anything. My veto pen is ready and inked up. I will fight you and your agenda til the movers come on January 20th, 2017. I am still the President.”
Alan Abramowitz: “The fate of the incumbent party’s candidate is strongly influenced by the popularity of the outgoing president. In fact, the incumbent president’s approval rating explains over half of the variance in the vote share of his party’s nominee. All three candidates seeking to succeed presidents with approval ratings below 50% were defeated, and the two seeking to succeed presidents with approval ratings below 40% were decisively defeated. In contrast, two of the three candidates seeking to succeed presidents with approval ratings above 50% won the popular vote, although one of those candidates, Al Gore in 2000, ended up losing the electoral vote.”
Joe Klein appreciates Obama’s political deftness:
There were twin sources of the white flight from the Democratic party. One was the sense that Democrats were only interested in taking money from people like the Erlers and giving it to deadbeats, or feeding the government bureaucracy, personified by the post office stereotype: slow-moving, sullen, entitled. The other was a matter of values: the Democrats were the counterculture party, an argument that is evaporating as the culture has moved on, accepting homosexuality, premarital sex and, soon, marijuana. The first argument remains strong, though. It was what propelled the Republican victory in 2014. Obamacare was perceived as classic “liberalism”—it took money from hard-working Americans and gave it to unhealthy deadbeats. Only it didn’t: it gave subsidies to the working poor; the indigent were already covered by Medicaid.
The striking thing about Obama’s latest round of proposals is how targeted they are: the centerpiece tax reforms take money from the wealthy and give it to middle-class taxpayers, people like the Erlers. You have to actually pay taxes to benefit from tax credits (except for the child care deduction, which becomes a stipend for those who don’t). Even his free community college proposal might have been a boon to Rebekah, as she struggled to learn accounting. This is quite the opposite of offering health insurance to a country that was already 85% covered. It is middle-class populism: money is taken from the wealthy and given to a broad swath of the population whose incomes have been stagnating for 30 years.
Douthat imagines how the left and right will respond to the president:
[Obama’s] influence over Clinton’s campaign will depend on economic trends and foreign policy developments as well as her own choices: If he’s climbed to a 47-48 percent approval rating by early 2016, I wouldn’t expect there to be any daylight between his agenda and her platform; if he falls back toward 40 percent (or drops below) amid some unlooked-for crisis, then no presidential speech is likely to constrain Hillary from trying to charting a more post-Obama course.
Meanwhile, the future relevance of his stab at a middle class agenda will be determined in part by whatever the G.O.P. comes up with for its post-Obama blueprint. If you contrast what was on offer last night with some of the ideas that, say, Utah Senator Mike Lee has proposed, there’s a very interesting right-left debate to be had around higher education reform, tax reform (family-friendly and otherwise), and other issues as well. But maybe the eventual Republican nominee will have a very different game plan, and the big clashes will end up happening elsewhere. Or maybe the mere fact that Obama has touched these issues will prompt the right to retreat to “safer” (that is, staler) ground.
