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Obama's State of the Union presented an ambitious liberal agenda
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union last night was tough and progressive. He forcefully laid out his vision of America, and his followers loved it while his opponents hated it.
For Ezra Klein the speech was “extraordinarily ambitious,” as he writes on his Wonkblog in The Washington Post:
“Imagine, for a moment, that President Obama managed to pass every policy he proposed tonight. Within a couple of years, every four-year-old would have access to preschool. The federal minimum wage would be at $9 — higher than it’s been, after adjusting for inflation, since 1981. There’d be a cap-and-trade program limiting our carbon emissions and a vast infrastructure investment to upgrade our roads and bridges. Taxes would be higher, guns would be harder to come by, and undocumented immigrants would have a path to citizenship. America would be a noticeably different country.”
That is unlikely to happen, but if Obama meets some of his goals, as Los Angeles Times’ Doyle McManus writes, like “immigration reform, even modest steps on gun control, an end to the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan, a free-trade agreement with Europe and, oh yes, implementation of Obamacare — and manages to keep the economy growing, even if slowly, that’s not a bad list. Plenty of two-term presidents have done worse.”
“Long gone,” writes The New Yorker’s John Cassidy on his blog Rational Irrationality “is the era when he (Obama) treated Republicans as reasonable men and women with whom he could do business. Nowadays, he is in permanent campaign mode.”
Yes, it seems so with his re-election. We are seeing a new and more self-confident President, one who has given up on his previous themes of bipartisanship. He spoke his peace about how he sees America and where he wants to take the country in his remaining four years in the White House. And it is an unabashedly liberal vision.
Still, Obama’s fifth State of the Union never seemed to really take off until the end when the subject was guns and gun control. “They deserve a vote,” Obama repeated time and again, urging Congress to bring the new proposals for gun control to a vote:
“Gabby Giffords deserves a vote; the families of Newtown deserve a vote; the families of Aurora deserve a vote; the families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence – they deserve a simple vote.”
“Our actions will not prevent every senseless act of violence in this country. Indeed, no laws, no initiatives, no administrative acts will perfectly solve all the challenges I’ve outlined tonight. But we were never sent here to be perfect…The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem. They don’t expect those of us in this chamber to agree on every issue. But they do expect us to put the nation’s interests before party. They do expect us to forge reasonable compromise where we can.”
We are likely to see little of this in the coming years as the Republicans in their response showed no indication to meet the President half way. We are in for continued confrontation and political paralysis in Washington. And that’s depressing.
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A Swede's view from D.C.
Internationally renowned journalist Klas Bergman will on a continuous basis cover the 2012 U.S. election process from a Swedish American perspective. Born in Stockholm, Bergman spent most of his adult life outside Sweden, reporting from western and eastern Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., based in Washington, DC and working mainly for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and the Christian Science Monitor.
His primary domicile has been America, ever since his early student days in California in the 1960s. He now lives in the Washington, DC area.
For more information on the columnist and communications specialist, see http://ksbergman.wordpress.com
Klas Bergman's second book, "Drömmarnas Land" is released in Sweden on Sept. 20. isbn 978 91 7331 515 9. 278 pages, hard cover, in Swedish.
Carlsson Bokförlag.
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