Barack Obama wants to win the future, which, if you have to pick something to win, is as good as any. I’m not sure what it means precisely — who doesn’t want to win the future? — but I know why he said it.
His point was that America is not destined for decline. Or doesn’t have to be, anyway.
That’s why Obama said, “We do big things.” He said it twice. With feeling. This, he said, is who we are. It’s not exactly an original thought, but everyone had to applaud, including John Boehner, who clearly didn’t want to. I guess Boehner figured that wearing a blindingly purple tie was a sufficient gesture.
You win elections, and American hearts and minds, by playing the optimism card, the better-tomorrow card. Reagan had morning in America. Clinton had Fleetwood Mac.
Obama had what they called “date night” in the House, in which there was cross-party seating and, as a result, no made-for-TV dissent section. It was as if we really were getting along in the wake of the violence in Tucson.
And Obama had a speech to give. It wasn’t a bold speech. There was no visionary moment. He talked about this being our Sputnik moment — if you’re too young to know what that is, that’s why America invented Google — but he offered no Apollo-like project. He said we can do great things and emphasized education. Improving education would be a great thing, but not a great thing, if you know what I mean.
Obama argued instead we’ve moved past the worst of the recession and that it’s time to start moving forward — and notes, just for effect, that China and India are busy building infrastructure while we, still the richest country in the world, can’t get our fancy-schmancy iPhones to work in the basement (or maybe that’s just my problem).
And he must have been thrilled when Rep. Paul Ryan, in his official Republican response, countered with an America facing catastrophe, which is just how Obama wanted the debate to play out.
“We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century,” Ryan said. “This is 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.”
It’s no scoop that Americans these days are cynical. But it’s not our default position. Do we really think hard-working Americans are being lulled by paltry unemployment checks into their hammocks? That’s not cynicism. It’s ugly classism.
When presidents — nearly all presidents — deliver their State of the Union speeches, the instant polls generally range from good to great. We root for the guy behind the lectern.
If we’re at record levels of cynicism about our institutions, it’s for any number of reasons, starting, probably, with toxic media — we know too much and at the same time we know too little. See, for example, Rep. Michele Bachmann’s recent Iowa speech, in which she says the “very founders that wrote (the Constitution and Declaration of Independence) worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Is the key to the future a false vision of the past?
Taking on the cynicism about government, Obama said we can have smart, responsible government. And if that seems like a late-night laugh line, and it is, consider the counter-argument — that we have to cut government and rely on smart, responsible hedge-funders, who, by the way, also get massive tax breaks.
It seems strange how Obama’s polling numbers rebounded so quickly from the self-described November shellacking. Actually, it’s less strange than you might think. It’s like the swing elections we keep having. We’re dissatisfied, but we’re not sure how to make things any better.
We have a deeply worried middle class. John Hickenlooper wore us out with his kitchen table talk and how people balance their budgets there. The truth is, many didn’t balance their budgets. To keep up, they borrowed on credit cards and home equity lines. And the years of stagnant salaries finally hit home when the bubble burst.
Now we have to attack deficits that have piled up because we refused to pay for what we bought. There’s a Gallup poll out now that shows people want cuts, but when asked about specifics, they’re against cuts to nearly all programs.
In any case, the deficits didn’t cause the housing bubble or the recession or runaway medical costs or a war in Iraq.
We have to take on the deficit, but fixing it won’t make any of those issues go away. Obama’s speech pointedly didn’t say how exactly to fix any of these problems. What he wants the argument to be is about whether we — that’s the bipartisan “we” — can fix them at all. And you don’t have to guess which side he’d take.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@.
