Obama's business-hostile presidency. (Update.)

The U.S. economy has just posted an impressive 5.9% jump in Q4 GDP growth, less than a year after Obama inherited an economy in freefall. Also, the Dow Jones jumped 29.5% in Obama's first year, the third-best performance of any president. (The top two honors also go to Democrats, FDR's 96.5%, albeit starting from a post-Crash low; and Harry Truman's 30.9%.) The average change in the Dow in the president's first year is +24% for Democrats, -1% for Republicans. The GOP, of course, has for decades enjoyed the reputation for superior management of the economy. Yet for a century the U.S. economy by a wide margin has performed better during Democratic presidencies. Go figure.

Call the bankers' bluff!

Obama's proposed $90 billion tax over 10 years on the largest U.S. banks is a pittance, Bloomberg Business Week columnist Chris Farrell argues, amounting to just 5% or so of the banks' projected profits and bonuses. Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., who recently whined he's tired of bankers being made out as "pariahs," now warns that banks will just pass on the tax to customers.

Oh really?

That would just open the door to competition, as customers already are looking for any opportunity to defect from the widely loathed big banks, which in their customer-friendly way have jacked up interest rates on credit cards (to 29.9% in many cases) and hidden fees on ATM overdrafts while continuing to withhold funds from creditworthy businesses, especially small enterprises.

There are more than 7,000 banks in the U.S. whose names are not J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo and so on. And there are massive non-bank enterprises that would love to bolster their sales still more by obtaining Washington's permission to get into the banking business. As TK writes:

The big banks can try to pass on the tax to customers, but that provides an opening for their competitors, including credit unions, community banks, independent banks, and some online banks. For instance, Arianna Huffington and Rob Johnson of the Huffington Post recently launched a Move Your Money campaign urging Americans to do business with smaller community banks. These smaller institutions won't have to pay the levy, and they can pass on that savings to customers.

For just a moment, however, let's take industry lobbyists at face value. The banks will pass on the cost of this unfair, punitive, vindictive tax to customers. In that case, Washington should call the bankers' bluff by changing the competitive environment. Several years ago Wal-Mart (WMT) wanted to get into the banking business, and the industry opposed the retailing giant's move. But the world is quite a different place now, and opening up the market to more competition for basic banking services, such as checking, savings, and debit cards, could benefit consumers. Wal-Mart, in particular, could bring its monolithic drive for everyday low prices into the basic banking business. All of a sudden people may well ask themselves, "Why should I bank with big, high-fee banks when I can get good service at a cheap price at Wal-Mart?" Why indeed?

Next time he's in Canada, Dimon might want to drop into a Loblaws, biggest grocery retailer in the nation. For some 20 years it's been a major financial player with its customer-friendly PC Financial (for "President's Choice," the label for the chain's extensive, popular line of private-label goods. PC Financial's kiosks, which occupy a tiny amount of space in Loblaws' cavernous superstores, offer basic deposit-taking and home, car and other lending services - the most low-margin but low-risk end of the banking business. And with a lot of customers, even a low-margin business with low costs (rent, power and insurance are free!), it's a lucrative sideline that skims a lot of business from traditional banks.

And Loblaw Cos. Ltd., big as it is, doesn't have anywhere near the million customers a day Wal-Mart's U.S. operation boasts.

 

 

 

 

America the ungovernable, Pt. 1.

And this, my friends, is the calm, deliberative reaction to recent events.

1. Paul Krugman, liberal NYT columnist, writing Thursday:

We’re paralyzed in the face of mass unemployment and out-of-control health care costs. Don’t blame Mr. Obama. There’s only so much one man can do, even if he sits in the White House. Blame our political culture instead, a culture that rewards hypocrisy and irresponsibility rather than serious efforts to solve America’s problems. And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable, if they choose — and they have so chosen.

I’m sorry to say this, but the state of the union — not the speech, but the thing itself — isn’t looking very good.

2. David Brooks, moderate-conservative NYT columnist, writing Thursday:

There is a specter haunting America: the specter of a saner, updated version of Ross Perot. He is lurking out there, ready to ride the free-floating anger and distrust of Washington. He is out there now in one of his homes or private jets, getting madder by the day. He is large of ego, full of money and cranky in mien.

When he enters the arena, he’ll say that Washingtonians, all of them, are a bunch of failures. Over the past five years, Washington has tried to reform Social Security, immigration, health care and energy policy. All of these efforts have either failed or are close to failure — thousands of people working millions of hours and in all likelihood producing nothing.

He’ll point out that Washingtonians, all of them, breed selfishness. Republicans refuse to accept tax increases. Democrats reject spending cuts. They’ve put the country on a highway to a fiscal crisis, and there are no exit ramps...

If the setbacks of the last year haven’t radicalized you about the sickness of our current political system, Mr. President, I don’t know what will. Are you really content to spend the year lobbying for tiny tax credits for ineffective training programs?

He’s out there — that saner Ross Perot. He’s a-comin’. The country would be better off if it were you.

3. Alex Massie, a former Washington correspondent for The Scotsman who now writes for the U.K. Spectator. The following is excerpted from his recent piece in the U.S. journal Foreign Policy. 

In 1939, Joseph Kennedy, then serving as U.S. ambassador to Britain, petitioned President Franklin D. Roosevelt to restrict foreign screenings of Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on the grounds that the film was "an indictment of our government" that "will cause our allies to view us in an unfavorable light." Capra's depiction of a Washington dominated by special interests and toadying political hacks also angered Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley, a Democrat from Kentucky, who complained that the movie presented a "grotesque distortion" of Washington politics that suggested that the Senate was nothing more than an "aggregation of nincompoops."

So not much has changed in the last 70 years.

These days, mind you, there's no need for a latterday Capra to come to Washington -- not when the Senate's tragicomedy is broadcast to the world daily by CNN and the Internet. International observers of Washington politics gaze with wonder at a system that produces so much drama from so little legislation and a republic in which even winning a contest by a landslide can't guarantee success. American elections used to have consequences. Now, they merely determine which party the public wants to hate next.

That's one explanation for the present sorry state of affairs, in which the party occupying the White House and controlling both houses of Congress cannot figure out how to pass a health-care bill that has been the progressive Holy Grail since the time of Harry Truman. Of course, the other obvious conclusion to be drawn is that the Democratic Party simply isn't very good at politics.

Sources:

Paul Krugman, NYT: March of the peacocks.

David Brooks, NYT: The Perot option.

Alex Massie, Foreign Policy: An aggregation of nincompoops.

America the ungovernable, Pt. 2.

We've reached one of those points in U.S. history where everyone, right and left, Republican and Democrat, and certainly everyone on Main Street, has thrown up their hands and declared that the republic is ungovernable.

The ruling party of the moment, the Dems, has the White House and majority control of both houses of Congress, and still it can't get anything done. Or at least that's the impression; the evidence suggests otherwise. Certainly they can't get big things done, conspicuously health care reform, but also climate-change and financial-markets reform bills that will endure tough sledding, and a betting person would say they won't happen.

This week, the president proposed that Congress create a deficit-reduction commission whose recommendations would be binding. Those recommendations would almost certainly be both tax increases and spending cuts. Neither party wanted to be held to those unpopular measures, even with the protective cover that a bipartisan or independent commission would give them. So both Dems and Republicans rejected the idea the same day it was proposed, prompting Obama to create a commission by executive order whose recommendations will not be binding. We've seen that story many times before, as when Reagan appointed industrialist W.R. Grace, in retirement, to head a cost-cutting commission. If anyone other than Grace's grandchildren read his report I'd be surprised.

That was the day before Obama's state of the union address, in which he proposed a return to "pay-go" (pay as you go) an all-too-brief law from what now seems the distant past in which proposed legislation had to include provisions for covering the cost of any proposed new expenditure in that legislation. The day after Obama's speech Congress looked up from its newspaper for a minute, said no to that also, and went back to reading Doonesbury.

What we have here is a factionalized Dem caucus in both houses, and a unified GOP opposed to everything proposed by the majority. The above-mentioned austerity measures had, in one case, sponsorship from no fewer than seven Republicans, who joined their partisan fellows in rejecting a measure they had sponsored.   

It's abundantly clear the GOP has no incentive in seeing the majority achieve anything. Only in that way, figures the GOP leadership, do they have something to run on in this November's off-year elections - namely a do-nothing Congress. (It worked for Truman in the 1948 election he was supposed to lose.) The fact the GOP is a prime culprit in do-nothing Congress will not be highlighted in its campaign literature. Yet the focus of voters in November won't be on obstructionist Republicans. It will be on Democratic failures.

There's such a consensus at the moment that GOP obstructionism to the Senate rule on filibusters (it's a Senate rule; it appears nowhere in the Constitution), the U.S. government is about as incapable of action as, well, not Somalia but the thought "failed state" does cross one's mind at such times.

I just want to say this has happened before, many times, and truth, justice and the American way ultimately have prevailed. When hotheads in Congress finally succeeded in getting the president onboard with a war against the British in 1812, New Englanders gave serious thought to secession. They did so again, albeit to a lesser degree, at the outset of the Civil War. The two decades prior to the Civil War were so racked with division over abolitionism that the republic was effectively ungovernable. Tycoon larcency was so rampant, so many jurists from circuit-court judges to the federal bench, were in the pockets of railroad barons that the era of Grant and his immediate successors seemed to be one in which America was a banana republic. Fast forward to the 1970s, the era of oil shocks, double-digit inflation, energy shortages, Watergate, the Nixon pardon, the Mayaguez, the hostage crisis, "rusty Fords" as a metaphor for American industrial decline, and that also seemed a period of ungovernablility, of directionlessness, of the people's will not being heard or acted upon in the Capitol.

And that's a partial list. So we've been here before. But America won the Cold War (actually, the Soviets lost it) Silicon Valley appeared out of seemingly nowhere and continues to thrive (have you ordered you iPad yet?), Hollywood kept dominating world culture (Bollywood's output is more prodigious but, for better or worse, is not widely exportable in the way that Julia Roberts and George Clooney and even, oy, Woody Allen, are), American women run multibillion-dollar corporations these days (Irene Rosenfeld's Kraft Foods just won a hostile bidding war for Cadbury, an venerable icon of British industry), contracting HIV/AIDS is no longer a death sentence, at least in this part of the world, Detroit is on the rebound (not the town, the industry) and Toyota is on the ropes (who'd have thunk it?), and Archie and Veronica are getting married. (I don't see a consummation of that engagement; I'm still rooting for Betty.) Life goes on.

It's only in that context that I excerpt the caustic observations on American federal politics at this moment. When David Brooks and Paul Krugman are in general agreement on a point, that's news. (See America the ungovernable, Pt. 1.) The third riff, by a British writer, on that zoo without bars on the other side of the Atlantic, has more than a touch of familiar snobbery to it, and assumes by omission that British governance is without its own glaring blemishes. (Did you catch the pious Blair's wholly unconvincing testimony this week on why he was compelled to spill British blood to oust Saddam and get those WMDs?) I include him only because the current Washington despair (it's worse than gridlock, it's a sense of resignation and utter futility) has caught the attention of at least some foreigners whom I can't help thinking are revelling in the sight of the world's lone superpower unable to break free of the threads (not string or rope, mere threads) by which it is, for the moment, denying itself the opportunity to make this the second American century.

A final word, on those threads. A victory on healthcare reform would instantly transform the despair to jubilant optimism about the endless possibilities of the "perfectable union" the current president speaks of. To achieve that healthcare-reform victor requires merely that the House Democrats unite, as they would in a parliamentary system, and vote for an already-passed Senate bill they admittedly don't like but is undeniably a quantam leap in establishing the principle of quality health care as a right, not a privilege, of American citizenship. It is proposed legislation that, once signed into law, coudl and would be greatly improved upon, incrementally, in the near future. As was the initially compromised Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and LBJ's first stab at Medicare in 1965. Medicare begat Medicaid, SCHIP, COBRA and all manner of other comfort-the-afflicted embellishments.

There's a more remote prospect of healthcare-reform victory, which is reconciliation and then "going nuclear" in the Senate by passing that final bill by 50-plus-one votes, bulldozing the odious and undemocratic filibuster in the process. The Dems are reluctant, to say the least, on even contemplating such a thing, because they worry the nuclear option will someday be used against them when they're once again in the minority.

But "minority rules," which is the state of American democracy at this time, is not what the Founders intended nor what this moment requires. The Founders wanted change to be difficult, fearing the downside of radicalism, but not impossible.

This moment requires bold leadership, possibly sacrificing one's re-election prospects in the public interest in the passage of the most important social reform in more than four decades. It will made America healthier, more fiscally sound, and a greater competitive threat in the global market. The reverse will unfold if reform fails, yet again.

As a practical matter, if Dems let this epic opportunity to strengthen the nation pass, a chorus of angels would have a tough time making the case for giving the Dems power ever again, since they're utterly hpaless in figuring out what to do with it. Indeed, after a deserved slaughtering in the midterms - a replay of the Dems' loss of both houses in 1994 - the Dems might just go the way of the Whigs and the Know Nothings of yesteryear, parties whose extinction was dictated by their irrelevance to an evolving nation. 

One can rail about GOP obstructionism. But if healthcare-reform dies, it will be an historic act of malpractice by the Democratic Party. Let no Democratic lawmaker in the Capitol fail to understand that. If you're a Democrat and haven't figured out that your party and your country are at stake, you'd be better off shoving a screwdriver in your ear and coming back as a lobster. You'll feel better for it.

Enjoy your weekend.

The secession option.

Lincoln ranks as one of the great American presidents, for holding the Union together.

But what if he hadn't? What if he'd failed, or opted to lead a new republic shorn of the Confederate states?

This thought has crossed my mind rarely, but never quite disappears. Folks like Richard Shelby can be relied upon to reawaken it.

The U.S. senator from Alabama delivered himself of the opinion yesterday that Obama's quest to deliver high-speed broadband access to rural and small-town America, in a nation with a lower Internet penetration rate than many of its global economic rivals, is a waste of money. A gimmick his state can do without.

I think the last time I contemplated the U.S. without the South was last year when Rick Perry, governor of Texas and also a Republican, spurned the Obama stimulus funds. Just so it was clear how strongly he felt about this, Perry suggested that this kind of federal largesse intrusion might be cause for the Texas Republic to someday secede. To which I expect I wasn't quite alone in responding, "So go, already."

The U.S. South, let's be honest, has been Ground Zero of resistance to progress ever since the "Southern Strategy" that Nixon used in 1968 to win the South back from the locally segregationalist Democrats who had controlled it since Reconstruction. The successful scheme, cooked up by a young GOP policy wonk named Kevin Phillips and chronicled in Garry Wills' Nixon Agonistes (1969), found Nixon playing to the basest racial fears still widespread south of the Mason-Dixon line. The same ones George Wallace also tapped that year, splitting the Dem vote and enabling Nixon to win a close race against Hubert Humphrey. (Phillips turned apostate, and in a string of books has excoriated the modern GOP.)

This state of affairs is not the least unusual. The 1990s "Velvet Revolution" saw a reluctant Czech Republic part ways peacefully with a Slovak Republic. The two should never had been yoked, the northern Czechs being innovators in industry and culture, fiercely resistant to Nazism and the evils it represented; and the Slovaks an agrarian economy highly sympathetic to Hitlerian ideals. On independence, India immediately split three ways, flanked by the new republics of Pakistan and Bangladesh  There are sizeable, restive enclaves everywhere you look, from the Basques to Northern Italy's Lombardy League to the ever squabbling Belgians held together by little more than inertia. The entente between Canada and Quebec remains an uneasy alliance, Quebec defending its maitre chez nous with a ferocity outsiders would regard as needlessly antgonoistic, given Quebec's by now entrenched cultural and commercial autonomy and the status of "nation" conferred on it by Stephen Harper.

What is unnatural is that such places as Tennessee and Maine should find themselves dwelling under the same roof, the appeal of Nascar being something of a mystery to Mainers and the L.L. Bean catalogue an effete affrontery to the coarse sensibilities of the Volunteer State. This is why Americans began in the late 19th century to invent national markers and elevate them to iconic status, from the Pledge of Allegiance to ordinances against flag burning. A modern-day de Tocqueville would regard these as signs of an identity crisis were it not for the geographic sprawl and economic and military might of a republic otherwise very much at odds with itself.  

The Republicans were born in the late 1850s as a messy congeries of former Whigs and breakaway Dems held together by abolitionism. Post-Nixon, the GOP, repudiating its noble origins, became the party opposed to racial equality. Let's be honest about that, too. In its then-primitive form, political correctness forbade Republicans from speaking openly about the hatred they were exploiting. But under Nixon, Reagan and the Bushes, equal-opportunity laws simply weren't enforced and the decades long march to civil-rights progress - and equal rights and pay for women, for good measure - stopped dead in its tracks.

Now consider, if the current-day U.S., about the same geographic size as Canada and China and boasting the world's third-largest population, was two countries today, Texas, with its affection for the death penalty and high per-capita reliance on federal subsidies in agriculture and oil that it accepts while priding itself on its rugged individualism, and Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas, with their top of the charts rankings in high-school dropout rates, illiteracy and meagre per capita income, could be their own backwater nation that ceased to hold the states north of the Mason-Dixon line hostage to their retrograde worldview.

The blue-dog Dems hail mostly from the South, of course, which makes one wonder now about the wisdom of Howard Dean, Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel, Northerners all, in recruiting good old boys from the South for Democratic contests. We now see that these "Dems" are scarcely more progressive than their Southern GOP counterparts. (Hi there, Blanche Lincoln!)

This notion of two Americas, notwithstanding Obama's hopeful 2004 coda of there being "no red states, no blue states, only the United States of America," seems fanciful, of course. But a U.S. Senate in which members representing just 10% of the population, many calling the South home, can and do consistently stymie the more progressive instincts of the North is evidence enough that America, as Canada was famously described in the 19th century on the French-English question, is also "two nations warring in the bosom of one state."

To date, Americans of varying philosophical outlooks have opted to take refuge in those regions most aligned with their values, be they the Mountain States or Vermont, as the case may be. ("The socialist republic of Vermont," as the late and lamentable pundit Richard Novak had it.) But a Vermonter cannot escape the will of a federal government unduly influenced by rednecks. For that matter, Texans are obliged to accept the federal subsidies shoved down their throats. Given the current fiscal train wreck that is America today, it might be for the best if Texas were given the freedom to truly experience rugged individualism.

Secession 2.0. It'll never happen, you say, But it's becoming tougher by the year to argue against it.

  

Enjoy your day.

 

J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)

I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around - nobody big. I mean, except me, And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff - I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day, I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

 

-The Catcher in the Rye (1951) 

Related

Gish Jen, New Republic: Why do people love Catcher in the Rye?

Stephen Metcalf, Slate: He was the great poet of post-traumatic stress.

Chris Wilson, Slate: Salinger's best story was also his least-read.

Sam Anderson, New York: A second chance to appreciate Salinger's work.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, NYT (editorial/appreciation): J.D. Salinger.

Charles McGrath, NYT: J.D. Salinger, literary recluse, dies at 91. (extended obituary)

Michiko Kakutani, NYT: Of teen angst and an author's alienation. (appraisal)

David L. Ulin, LAT: A gift of words and silence. (appreciation)

Sarah Ball, Newsweek: Salinger's wide-ranging influence, from crime to stage.

Unfortunately, at this writing, The New Yorker, where Jerome David Salinger did most of his work (even portions of Catcher first appeared as vignettes in The New Yorker), offers only subscriber-access links to the late author's stories in the magazine, and no comment on his passing or legacy. 

 

 

Yes, but did he hit it out of the park?

 
 
 
A little thing, but Barack Obama wasn't wearing his presidential cuff links Wednesday night. It's been a year, and I've seen Obama wear them once. Bill Clinton campaigned like Everyman, but post-election he became William Jefferson Clinton and didn't shed those honking presidential cuff links until his re-election campaign in 1996. A small thing, as I say, but I like a man who saves the French-cuff shirts for wedding anniversary nights out, New Year's Eve galas and official state dinners. Also, for the first time since Reagan began the practice of weaving notables in the visitor's gallery into his SOTU, the president last night did not in his first SOTU deploy that gimmick, save for kind words for the First Lady - one of a surprisingly large number of bipartisan applause lines.

We don't have in our parliamentary system an equivalent to the Yanks' State of the Union. A pity. I suppose one could balk at the pageantry, if one find such rituals overblown. I don't, not in this case. On no other occasion are the three branches of government the Founders devised present in one room. The cabinet is there, save one designated absentee to run the Republic in the event Capitol Hill is hit by a meteorite. The Supreme Court is there - and what a thrill, otherwise the Gang of Five on the high court would not have personally endured Obama's public scolding of their utter lack of jurisprudence in a Court decision last week that further pollutes American governance with corporate lucre. This was also a test for the media, which it predictably failed, ridiculing Ruth Bader Ginsberg for nodding off without mentioning that she's fighting a terminal illness. The head of each branch of the military service is there. All 535 federal legislators are there, including the leadership of the two major parties. (Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is the sole member of the Socialist caucus on the Hill.) Even D.C.'s Embassy Row clears out for this one; the cameras lingered for awhile on the Haitian ambassador to the U.S.

If you marvel at the American experiment - and if you don't, the Roman Republic and the Magna Carta likely don't engage your thoughts, either - this ritual commands your attention just for the spectacle of the world's oldest democracy in one room. Including by extension tens of millions of voters looking in. It's Oscar night, with much higher stakes. Last night, for instance, the president committed himself to ending the odious "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in the military, the kind of thing you'd like to tell your grandchildren you witnessed. I have to rely on grainy newsreels for LBJ's insertion of that poignant statement, "We shall overcome," in his 1965 SOTU, raising the curtain on his landmark civil-rights legislation that year.  

There were the usual great expectations for Barack Obama's speech, as there have been for his inaugural address, his first 100 days, his speech on healthcare in his second talk to a joint session of Congress (this was his third, Obama knows the routine by now), and of course for his first year in office.

Remarkably, Obama has not in his first year as president restored full employment to the Republic. He is on the brink of being the eighth president to fail to bring about universal health care. He has not brought peace to the Middle East. He has assembled a firing squad to dipatch the greedheads of Wall Street. ("Ya'll never take a deposit in this town again," blamo!). The lead headline of the New York Times' online edition this morning was "President Changes Course After Year of Failed Promises." I guess the editors of that paper, which has been gliding into irrelevance over the past decade, didn't read this or something akin to it.

We've heard lately that Obama needs to get his groove back, to "reset" his presidency. But Obama did not lose his groove. America lost its.

With good reason, 14 months ago Americans finally repudiated the disastrous presidential policies and practices of a "lost decade." (Eight years, of course; it just seemed like a generation.) And with unusually heightened enthusiasm in a presidential contest they chose by a decisive margin the candidate whose relative youth, obvious energy, intelligence and calm demeanour, and even his skin color was a break from a prolonged haitus from wisdom and common sense in Washington. 

But alas, the electorate soon lost its sense of urgency about the great tasks they chose this new man to tackle. When Obama proposed emergency financial assistance to Main Street; an overhaul of the world's biggest dysfunctional health care system; leadership rather than defiant ignorance on the global warming; energy self-sufficiency; education reform in a nation whose students are bested in literacy and numeracy by kids in Korea and Hungary; a world without nuclear weapons - any of which would try the sturdiest soul - the new president's political adversaries on the Hill opposed, in unshakable unity, every one of his major initiatives.

And members of Obama's own party broke ranks. They reverted to factions that can be crudely described as conservative (the self-style blue dogs), moderate and progessive, with further divisions to be found among the extremists in the conservative and progressive camps, making five factions in all.

We recall what Lincoln said about a house divided. And Will Rogers' jibe that "I don't belong to an organized party. I'm a Democrat." And when the freelancing began, and it seemed every freshman member of Congress had an obstructionist notion with which to gum up the works, the Americans who had so craved real leadership in Washington headed for the hills - what Obama last night admonished fellow Democrats not to do. So enthralled are Americans with the romantic notion of the single-combat warrior that it strikes them George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and FDR acted alone. Lincoln, who said without public opinion back of him he was impotent. Americans did not fight for the "change we can believe in" that Obama promised. And never mind that every time he said those words on the campaign trail he added that change wouldn't be easy and he would need a lot of help.

And so the president, for practical purposes, has been largely on his own in pulling the economy back from the abyss. In giving this Congress more, and more important, things to do than all but a half-dozen of its 110 predecessors. In fulfilling more campaign promises in his first year than any predecessor. In lifting America's regard abroad. (The U.S. is now the most admired nation, up from 7th before Obama took office). In nominating a superb jurist to the Supreme Court. Out of the blue Obama was cursed in his first year with a Nobel Peace Prize, cause for widespread mockery. The message of the Norwegians that Obama's humanitarian beliefs are be widely encouraged was completely lost on the American people and their talk-show tribunes. For at least some Americans with Parkinson's disease and other incurable ailments, Obama's reversal of his predecessor's restrictions on stem-cell research should be sufficient cause to be mighty thankful for the electoral outcome on Nov. 4, 2008.

But the man does not walk on water, as so many, at least in the chattering classes, assumed either that Obama could do or thought he could.

To answer my own question, yes, I think Obama hit it out of the park Wednesday night. He said what the moment required. And did so with his usual eloquence and common-sense analogies that have come to be taken for granted or dismissed as sophistry, and won't be appreciated until he's gone.

But it doesn't matter. Obama has been giving pitch-perfect speeches in service to his causes since long before he was elected. Yet while it's true that with words we govern, a president's words alone aren't nearly enough. Because he's a Democrat, one is tempted to think, Obama lacks the surrogates of a Reagan or Dubya to amplify his message and constantly counter opponents with it. Americans are fixated on their president, never mind that the Constitution devotes half as many words ascribing powers to the presidency as to Congress, which they intended as the cockpit of American federal governance. Americans fixate on their president - on his wardrobe, his public-approval ratings, his rare loss of temper on learning that a close African-American friend had just been arrested for the crime of entering his own house. Perhaps, just perhaps, Barack Obama is a black supremist...

In a better-informed republic the fixation would extend to the opportunists Olympia Snowe and Joe Lieberman, the extortionist Ben Nelson, the ineffectual Harry Reid, the casually mendacious GOP leadership on the Hill. I was taught as a kid that the Congressional maxim is, "The president proposes, the Congress disposes." Maybe they don't teach elementary civics in America anymore. If they did, you would know that Congress merits as much scrutiny, probably more, than the administration.

Obama blamed himself last night - a self-deprecation one would like to see among bank CEOs - for not sufficiently explaining the proposed healthcare reforms to Americans. I say "the" rather than "his" because the reforms arise from lengthy debate among 535 lawmakers on the Hill. Obama put healthcare reform on the agenda. He is not a lawmaker - a distinction first blurred when Dubya quixotically described himself as head of the executive and legislative branches.

Obama's assertion is complete nonsense, of course. In his second address to a joint session of Congress, devoted soley to healthcare reform, Obama made clear, in uplifting rhetoric and gritty detail, what the reforms were all about. He explained "death panels," which happen hundreds of times a day in America and are known to doctors as "end of life discussions" among patient, family and caregivers. The only unwelcome intruder in those deliberations is a private insurer on whose generosity the decision to maintain costly treatment overly depends.

With two wars on his hands, an obsolete national-security apparatus to reinvent for the post-Cold War era, globetrotting to pressure world heads of state to open their markets to U.S. exports and plenty else to keep him busy, Obama talked health-care reform to Americans all last year in town-hall meetings, formal speeches in hotel ballrooms and high-school gyms, and in one-on-one interviews with the punditry and TV anchors. This despite the handicap of having to "sell" a long overdue proposed overhaul of one-fifth of the U.S. economy not knowing exactly what he was pitching because the details were under intense debate by no fewer than five Congressional committees for the better part of the year.  

Obama's healthcare-reform principles, mind you, could not have been clearer. Namely, healthcare as a right of American citizenship, no longer a privilege of those who can afford it. No more abusive treatment of Americans by private insurers. And a reduction in the spiralling healthcare costs that threaten to bankrupt the Republic by mid-century. Unusual for a Democrat, with the Democrats' weakness for wonkery, Obama reduced to its essentials a healthcare system more complex than the mysteries of DNA so that even Mitch McConnell could understand it. If Americans still "don't get what's in it for them," as Obama said last night, they haven't been listening. Doing their homework to sift fearmongering from truth in a realm that affects their everyday lives.  

Yes, a reset is in order. That's what Obama delivered Wednesday. In the all-important opening passages of his talk, Obama tried to reset the American mood by citing the much tougher trials the nation has previously faced and overcome. He gave them a context, America's sprawling history in which to contemplate today's relatively minor discomforts. Fifteen million Americans out of work is a crisis. But 10% unemployment is not without precedent: it's the level of joblessness in Reagan's America at this point in the Gipper's presidency. It's no Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor.

Obama in those same opening words made what some of us consider the obvious point that he "gets it." In fact, he knows a great deal more about the suffering of economically distressed Americans than perhaps anyone, because he learns anew about it every day, in reports from the Bureau of Labour Statistics, the remedies suggested by his economic team, and the 10 letters from everyday Americans he reads each night before bed.

Having given the occasional speech, I have to admire Obama's blend of historic perspective and present-day urgency captured in the all-important opening passages:

Our Constitution declares that from time to time, the President shall give to Congress information about the state of our union. For two hundred and twenty years, our leaders have fulfilled this duty. They have done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility. And they have done so in the midst of war and depression; at moments of great strife and great struggle.

It's tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable - that America was always destined to succeed. But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt. When the market crashed on Black Tuesday and civil rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain. These were times that tested the courage of our convictions, and the strength of our union. And despite all our divisions and disagreements; our hesitations and our fears, America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, and one people.

Again, we are tested. And again, we must answer history's call.

One year ago, I took office amid two wars, an economy rocked by severe recession, a financial system on the verge of collapse, and a government deeply in debt. Experts from across the political spectrum warned that if we did not act, we might face a second depression. So we acted - immediately and aggressively. And one year later, the worst of the storm has passed.

But the devastation remains. One in ten Americans still cannot find work. Many businesses have shuttered. Home values have declined. Small towns and rural communities have been hit especially hard. For those who had already known poverty, life has become that much harder.

This recession has also compounded the burdens that America's families have been dealing with for decades - the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college.

So I know the anxieties that are out there right now. They're not new. These struggles are the reason I ran for President. These struggles are what I've witnessed for years in places like Elkhart, Indiana and Galesburg, Illinois. I hear about them in the letters I read each night. The toughest to read are those written by children - asking why they have to move from their home, or when their mom or dad will be able to go back to work.

For these Americans and so many others, change has not come fast enough. Some are frustrated; some are angry. They don't understand why it seems like bad behavior on Wall Street is rewarded but hard work on Main Street isn't; or why Washington has been unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems. They are tired of the partisanship and the shouting and the pettiness. They know we can't afford it. Not now.

So we face big and difficult challenges. And what the American people hope - what they deserve - is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds, different stories and different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared. A job that pays the bills. A chance to get ahead. Most of all, the ability to give their children a better life.

You know what else they share? They share a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity. After one of the most difficult years in our history, they remain busy building cars and teaching kids; starting businesses and going back to school. They're coaching little league and helping their neighbors. As one woman wrote me, "We are strained but hopeful, struggling but encouraged."

It is because of this spirit - this great decency and great strength - that I have never been more hopeful about America's future than I am tonight. Despite our hardships, our union is strong. We do not give up. We do not quit. We do not allow fear or division to break our spirit. In this new decade, it's time the American people get a government that matches their decency; that embodies their strength.

 

Related

Transcript of Obama's SOTU address.

E.J. Dionne Jr., WaPo: Obama shows he's a conciliator, and also willing to fight.

Bruce Reed, Slate: Obama reminds his own party to keep its head and the other party to stop losing its mind.

John Dickerson, Slate: Obama 2.0. The president uses the state of the union speech to relaunch his brand.

Ezra Klein, WaPo: A good speech that needs a good follow-through.

Dana Milbank, WaPo: A polite state of the union.

Andrew Sullivan, Atlantic: A republic, if you can keep it.

Michelle Goldberg, Daily Beast: Obama does it again.

Christopher Buckley, Daily Beast: One hell of a speech.

Jonathan Chait, New Republic: Obama's dull, cheap, successful speech.

Jonathan Cohn, New Republic: Great speech. Don't stop now.

Paul Krugman, NYT: Pretending to be stupid.

James Surowiecki, New Yorker: The state of the union.

Alex Pareene, Gawker: Barack Obama's state of the union was awesome.

Steve Benen, Washington Monthly: Why it worked.

Jeff Mason, Reuters: Did he get his groove back?

 

 

 

 

Year One.

Invitation to the inauguration of the 44th president.

Jan. 20, 2009: Inauguration of America's first black president.

A post-inaugural meeting with members of Congress. 

A man carries a life-size cutout of the U.S. president past the Canadian parliament in Ottawa, to which Obama made his first official state visit.

Obama inspects the goods at an Ottawa gift shop.

First speech to a joint session of Congress.

The First Lady studies a memorial to women war heroes.

Michelle Obama pitches in at a local D.C. soup kitchen.

Michelle Obama reading to D.C.-area schoolchildren.

Snow fun on the South Lawn.

Obama can't disguise his excitement over a U.S. space mission.

Meeting in Berlin with his German counterpart, Chancellor Angela Merkel.

The Commander-in-Chief poses with the troops in Baghdad.

Jogging with White House mascot Bo, a Portuguese water dog donated to the Obama daughters, Malia and Sasha, by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy.

Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and the president's successful nominee for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor.

Inspecting U.S. fighter jets.

Receiving honors from Saudi King Saud in Riyadh.

Pointing out the sights to Malia from Paris' Pompideau Centre.

Sasha lights a votive candle in the lobby of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris.  

Michelle Obama with D.C.-area schoolchildren at the organic garden she planted on the South Lawn.

Sasha helps pack food boxes for distribution to low-income people in D.C.

Obama signs a tribute to America's wartime women aviators.

Meeting at the Kremlin with his Russian counterpart, Dimitry Medvedev.

Obama and Medvedev in Moscow.

Papal visit at the Vatican.

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi, host of the G-20 summit in L'Aquila, bids his guests inside for dinner.

Obama visits the White House press center with a gift for veteran reporter Helen Thomas, who shares an August 4th birthday with the president.

Canadian PM Stephen Harper, Mexican President Felipe Caleron and Obama at a Nafta summit.

A schoolchild takes notes during the president's nationally televised back-to-school address.

Obama addresses a joint session of Congress on the proposed healthcare reform bill.

Michelle and Barack Obama host the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, here greeting Nicolas Sarkozy and the French president's wife, Carla Bruni.   

Checking out microbes at a federally funded research centre.

Addressing medical interns on the South Lawn on healthcare reforms.

Lining up for the president's autograph at a domestic U.S. military base.

The Obamas return from Sunday worship.

Hoops with White House staffers and members of Congress.

A break from work with daughters Malia and Sasha. 

Greeting naval officers.

Address on alternative energy at a solar-panel facility.

"Dignified transfer" of fallen soldiers at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Tribute to victims of a shooting spree at Fort Hood, Texas.

Meeting in Tokyo with the Japanese PM.

Obama helps out at Martha's Table on Thanksgiving.

The First Family reacts to the lighting of the White House Christmas tree.

Obama prepares for his H1N1 flu shot.

The First Couple attends a Christmas pageant in D.C.

Pensive moment during a climate-change meeting, with White House advisor David Axelrod.

 
Reading a Christmas tale to schoolchildren.

A visit from members of the Boys & Girls Club of Washington, D.C. ends with a group photo.

Bill Clinton and Geroge W. Bush, Obama fundraising recruits in Haiti earthquake relief.

Snowball fight with Rahm Emanuel, White House chief of staff.

Obama meets with students before an address on an education-funding initiative.

Obama is a server at a Yuletide food-bank dinner.