IMPress Polly
02-13-2013, 12:14 PM
Every year, the American president delivers a State of the Union Address, which is generally used to compliment himself on a job well done thus far and lay out his specific policy goals for the year ahead. President Obama's State of the Union Address for 2013, made last night, was no exception.
As I discussed last month, the inaugural address is generally considered to be a president's broad statement of principles and general goals to be achieved over the next four years, whereas the State of the Union translates some of those principles into concrete policy ideas for the year to come. The former is an ideological speech, while the latter is more practical in nature and spirit. The president's State of the Union Address last night though was notable for the sheer breadth of policy ideas the president proposed. None of the legislation and direct executive actions he proposed were particularly radical (indeed they all seemed carefully poll-tested), but they did skew left-of-center in general (in keeping with the tone of his recent, very communitarian inaugural speech) and there were a lot of them. I mean a lot. Enough to where it seems unlikely that the president will be able accomplish the majority of them within the next year's time, though they are all quite temperate proposals. Specifically, President Obama proposed that the federal minimum wage be raised to $9 an hour and permanently indexed to the cost of living, that initiative be taken to make preschool education universal (whereas presently less than 3 out of 5 American children gets preschool education), that the Congress pass a new infrastructure bill, that tax loopholes for corporations and the rich be closed, that the Violence Against Women Act be belatedly renewed, that Congress at last pass the Paycheck Fairness Act (women's rights legislation to establish equal pay for work that produces equal value, not just for the exact same jobs), that immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants be passed, and that Congress at least take a vote on all the gun control measures he has been campaigning for since the Sandy Hook massacre (including a ban on the future sale of assault rifles). The president also announced that 34,000 more U.S. troops will be pulled out of Afghanistan by this time next year. That's half the total number of American troops occupying that country at present. He also notably confirmed that our direct role in the Afghanistan War would definitely be concluded altogether by the end of next year. And while he talked a tough, imperial game on foreign policy more broadly, he tempered these sentiments by remarking that outright war and full-scale occupations should be avoided in the future and by defending his plan to dismantle a significant amount of our nuclear arsenal in concert with Russia doing the same for their side. Obama also announced his renewed support for cap-and-trade policies to address global warming by limiting carbon emissions through, as he aptly put it, "market-based" means, and furthermore envisioned a future without any oil consumption at all. President Obama also spoke at some length to the latest budget crisis gripping Washington: the automatic across-the-board spending cuts the president wrongly agreed to in 2011 as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling. These cuts are set to go into effect on March 1st if no action is taken. Half the cuts in this "sequester" are cuts to public welfare programs (food stamps, unemployment insurance, public education, and so on) and half are cutbacks in the rate of military expenditure of a size that would require our government to close certain bases abroad and patrol certain seas with fewer ships. I can very much support the latter (the military cuts), but not the former ( the public welfare cuts). If they should go into effect, these automatic across-the-board spending cuts would very likely cause another economic recession. One can thus easily see the need to avoid them somehow. Yet I cannot same that I'm open to the president's solution, which is a proposal for a "grand bargain" with the Republicans on the national debt. To put it in direct fiscal terms, the president has already agreed to some $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, only about one-third of which comes from raising tax revenues. By contrast, the president is proposing to temporarily slow the rate of cuts in order to avoid a recession, but at the same time, to ultimately cut the deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade, with about half the difference coming from tax hikes on corporations and the super-rich in general and less than is currently scheduled in military cuts. Such a proposal is really just as bad, if not worse, IMO.
I would characterize the contents of the president's speech as 75% progressive. All in all, this was an unusually high-quality speech by the president, though naturally I could find things to disagree with. The policy ideas here weren't generally ambitious in nature when taken separately, but the collective whole of them presents what, for a single-year agenda, nevertheless constitutes a very ambitious set of goals indeed. The sheer scope of President Obama's 2013 agenda laid out last night was inspiring in its own right. We will see what of it becomes law.
(Most analysts agree that the high water mark of the speech was definitely the moment toward the end when he sought to address the topic of gun violence using a powerful emotional appeal that roused most of Congress to a sustained standing ovation, cheers, and tears. It goes to highlight what I pointed out before: that emotional appeals can indeed, used appropriately, be more effective than simple statements of fact and data.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKwE2EGsfMk
[/URL]
As a follow-up, below you will find the Republican Party's official response to the president's State of the Union Address, presented by Florida Senator Marco Rubio. As I've mentioned recently, I'm strongly convinced Mr. Rubio will be running for president himself in 2016 and that this was an attempt to set the stage for that run on his part, and an effort by his party to give him the opportunity to prove himself capable of winning a presidential election. To give him proper credit, this probably was his best speech ever in terms of the quality of delivery. He made it personal (and thus human) at more than one point and spoke fairly eloquently and as inoffensively as his message would allow. It seemed though that Mr. Rubio was responding to a different speech. Mr. Rubio offered few specific policy alternatives to those the president presented. Mostly he just spoke in right wing ideological platitudes about the proper role of government and such. The State of the Union Address is about concrete policy ideas for the year ahead, not worldviews. Let me suggest that an appropriate and convincing response would also therefore be more essentially about proposing concrete policy ideas, not just politely whining about the natural evils of excessive government or whatever and the need for more than twice the budget austerity the president has aimed for (i.e. guaranteed, long-lasting recession). It seemed as though Mr. Rubio were in essence speaking not so much to the nation as specifically to Republican primary voters -- the GOP base -- such as to reassure them of his ideological fidelity. There was nothing in this speech that I could possibly agree with aside from Rubio's brief remarks in support of immigration reform. I therefore conclude that it was not intended to be an outreach speech so much as a far right persuasion speech. Here you go...
[URL]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLmZbBh83-I (http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3 DCKwE2EGsfMk&h=0AQEyJQsA&s=1)
As I discussed last month, the inaugural address is generally considered to be a president's broad statement of principles and general goals to be achieved over the next four years, whereas the State of the Union translates some of those principles into concrete policy ideas for the year to come. The former is an ideological speech, while the latter is more practical in nature and spirit. The president's State of the Union Address last night though was notable for the sheer breadth of policy ideas the president proposed. None of the legislation and direct executive actions he proposed were particularly radical (indeed they all seemed carefully poll-tested), but they did skew left-of-center in general (in keeping with the tone of his recent, very communitarian inaugural speech) and there were a lot of them. I mean a lot. Enough to where it seems unlikely that the president will be able accomplish the majority of them within the next year's time, though they are all quite temperate proposals. Specifically, President Obama proposed that the federal minimum wage be raised to $9 an hour and permanently indexed to the cost of living, that initiative be taken to make preschool education universal (whereas presently less than 3 out of 5 American children gets preschool education), that the Congress pass a new infrastructure bill, that tax loopholes for corporations and the rich be closed, that the Violence Against Women Act be belatedly renewed, that Congress at last pass the Paycheck Fairness Act (women's rights legislation to establish equal pay for work that produces equal value, not just for the exact same jobs), that immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants be passed, and that Congress at least take a vote on all the gun control measures he has been campaigning for since the Sandy Hook massacre (including a ban on the future sale of assault rifles). The president also announced that 34,000 more U.S. troops will be pulled out of Afghanistan by this time next year. That's half the total number of American troops occupying that country at present. He also notably confirmed that our direct role in the Afghanistan War would definitely be concluded altogether by the end of next year. And while he talked a tough, imperial game on foreign policy more broadly, he tempered these sentiments by remarking that outright war and full-scale occupations should be avoided in the future and by defending his plan to dismantle a significant amount of our nuclear arsenal in concert with Russia doing the same for their side. Obama also announced his renewed support for cap-and-trade policies to address global warming by limiting carbon emissions through, as he aptly put it, "market-based" means, and furthermore envisioned a future without any oil consumption at all. President Obama also spoke at some length to the latest budget crisis gripping Washington: the automatic across-the-board spending cuts the president wrongly agreed to in 2011 as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling. These cuts are set to go into effect on March 1st if no action is taken. Half the cuts in this "sequester" are cuts to public welfare programs (food stamps, unemployment insurance, public education, and so on) and half are cutbacks in the rate of military expenditure of a size that would require our government to close certain bases abroad and patrol certain seas with fewer ships. I can very much support the latter (the military cuts), but not the former ( the public welfare cuts). If they should go into effect, these automatic across-the-board spending cuts would very likely cause another economic recession. One can thus easily see the need to avoid them somehow. Yet I cannot same that I'm open to the president's solution, which is a proposal for a "grand bargain" with the Republicans on the national debt. To put it in direct fiscal terms, the president has already agreed to some $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, only about one-third of which comes from raising tax revenues. By contrast, the president is proposing to temporarily slow the rate of cuts in order to avoid a recession, but at the same time, to ultimately cut the deficit by $4 trillion over the next decade, with about half the difference coming from tax hikes on corporations and the super-rich in general and less than is currently scheduled in military cuts. Such a proposal is really just as bad, if not worse, IMO.
I would characterize the contents of the president's speech as 75% progressive. All in all, this was an unusually high-quality speech by the president, though naturally I could find things to disagree with. The policy ideas here weren't generally ambitious in nature when taken separately, but the collective whole of them presents what, for a single-year agenda, nevertheless constitutes a very ambitious set of goals indeed. The sheer scope of President Obama's 2013 agenda laid out last night was inspiring in its own right. We will see what of it becomes law.
(Most analysts agree that the high water mark of the speech was definitely the moment toward the end when he sought to address the topic of gun violence using a powerful emotional appeal that roused most of Congress to a sustained standing ovation, cheers, and tears. It goes to highlight what I pointed out before: that emotional appeals can indeed, used appropriately, be more effective than simple statements of fact and data.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKwE2EGsfMk
[/URL]
As a follow-up, below you will find the Republican Party's official response to the president's State of the Union Address, presented by Florida Senator Marco Rubio. As I've mentioned recently, I'm strongly convinced Mr. Rubio will be running for president himself in 2016 and that this was an attempt to set the stage for that run on his part, and an effort by his party to give him the opportunity to prove himself capable of winning a presidential election. To give him proper credit, this probably was his best speech ever in terms of the quality of delivery. He made it personal (and thus human) at more than one point and spoke fairly eloquently and as inoffensively as his message would allow. It seemed though that Mr. Rubio was responding to a different speech. Mr. Rubio offered few specific policy alternatives to those the president presented. Mostly he just spoke in right wing ideological platitudes about the proper role of government and such. The State of the Union Address is about concrete policy ideas for the year ahead, not worldviews. Let me suggest that an appropriate and convincing response would also therefore be more essentially about proposing concrete policy ideas, not just politely whining about the natural evils of excessive government or whatever and the need for more than twice the budget austerity the president has aimed for (i.e. guaranteed, long-lasting recession). It seemed as though Mr. Rubio were in essence speaking not so much to the nation as specifically to Republican primary voters -- the GOP base -- such as to reassure them of his ideological fidelity. There was nothing in this speech that I could possibly agree with aside from Rubio's brief remarks in support of immigration reform. I therefore conclude that it was not intended to be an outreach speech so much as a far right persuasion speech. Here you go...
[URL]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLmZbBh83-I (http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3 DCKwE2EGsfMk&h=0AQEyJQsA&s=1)