James Agee’s novel, “A Death in the Family'” has a wonderfully illustrated nihilistic moment in which the father goes into the darkened bedroom of his child to console the child in an episode of fear of bogey monsters in the room. The father methodically peers behind the curtains, inside the closet, and under the bed, intoning at each step, “there’s nothing here.” After the last “there’s nothing here” the father quietly slips out of the room, leaving the child at rest.
President Obama’s State of the Union address was crafted to create just such a nihilistic moment for critical observers, alert to detect signals of new pathways to transformational innovations on American government. At each step, he skillfully wove self-renunciations where one might have expected resolute defenses (“let’s improve the health care law” as opposed to “you do not dare to tamper with the health care law”), Swiftian modest proposals (the commitment to long-term deficit – not debt – reduction on the economically insignificant order of $50 billion or so annually), and co-opting as if to the credit of the government the initiative of the private entrepreneur whose inventiveness saved the lives of Chilean miners. No gauntlets were thrown down, unless in the repeated form of “I will veto” any budget that comes with earmarks, and which is designed to align with the angels rather than to challenge the orthodox.
In short, the re-election campaign is under full steam. And the game plan is perfectly clear. The President will occupy the heights and invite the “enemy” to attempt a frontal assault. There was no surprise in the speech, which was structured to stand pat on the hand the President has already played, while putting his initiatives in as positive light as he could muster. It was a masterful, “apres vous, Gaston” speech, in which he effectively dared the Republican Party in Congress to take the first step on any of several of controversial initiatives, leaving him in the position to attack them solidly. This is true with entitlement reform (social security and Medicare), deficit reduction, and adjustments in the health care law.
The bulk of the speech was devoted to the domestic, economic agenda, with a call for further government spending as a job-creating initiative. The message: unless government does more, the proclaimed economic turnaround might just dissipate. Of course, there has not yet been a real turnaround from the perspective of the average citizen, but the president is laying the premise to be able to say that things were turning around until the Republicans aborted the turnaround by not accommodating the President’s proposals.
The President did not abandon the left agenda, as evidenced by the strident appeal for comprehensive immigration reform. The President knows that he is not going to obtain from Congress the immigration proposal he wants to make, but he makes a point of showing that he has the “courage” to call for it. Similarly, the reiteration that we will begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan in July this year, despite having spent the last two months backing off that commitment and substituting 2014 as the effective deadline, was a measure to reassure the left that he was not turning away. His strategy, fundamentally, is to persuade the left that he can expect no further progress on the agenda in the next two years, and the smart thing to do is to play for an electoral change in 2012 that will give them a second chance.
The speech was characterized by the most intensely patriotic formulation of the virtues of the United States that he has ever presented or perhaps is capable of. He made a very fine speech. It was not a great speech, but he does not make great speeches. The characteristic of a great speech is to move the audience to new conceptions or understandings of themselves. He has never accomplished that. He is rather orotund than eloquent. Nevertheless, this was a finely crafted and skillfully delivered speech.
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