“After five years of grit and determined effort, the United States is better-positioned for the 21st century than any other nation on Earth… America has never come easy. Our freedom, our democracy, has never been easy. Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged. But for more than two hundred years, we have put those things aside and placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress: to create and build and expand the possibilities of individual achievement; to free other nations from tyranny and fear; to promote justice and fairness and equality under the law.”
With those rousing words, Barack Obama came out with his fists swinging in his State of the Union address delivered to the United States Congress on January 28, just when he was almost written off as a disinterested lame-duck president with dismal approval ratings. He has faced an extremely recalcitrant Republican-controlled House of Representatives. It has opposed most of his major initiatives, none more so than the Affordable Care Act, the so-called Obamacare, which has attempted to reform the medical insurance system and extend its benefits. The confrontation between the president and the House even led to a partial shutdown of the U S government last October, as the federal spending bill was delayed. Clearly, Mr Obama had now decided to take on the Republicans, wiser after the fact that his earlier feeble attempts at bipartisanship had not worked.
The widely-leaked main plank of the Obama address was “Whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.” The president was buoyed by several positives from recent economic indicators. The U S growth was holding steady at an annual rate upward of 3%. The deficit had shrunk to less than half, though not necessarily by design and more likely a result of the confrontation between the executive and the legislature. Housing starts, a key indicator of the health of the economy, were looking up. Continuing shale gas recoveries had replaced gloom on energy with cautious optimism.
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That prompted the embattled president to list several areas in which he intended to bypass the legislature: raising the minimum wage in federally-funded projects to $10, slashing bureaucracy and streamlining project clearances, more hubs for high-tech initiatives, helping business build factories across states, protecting environment, promoting cleaner energy, among others. He enthusiastically plumped for enterprises that create more jobs, especially in technology-frontier areas, and lead to exports with a “Made in America” tag. Many of these, if not most, have been standard-issue components of the Obama agenda of the past five years, but the president chose not just to reiterate them but fight for them.
Free of re-election concerns, Mr Obama is now clearly thinking of his legacy, which has been under a cloud for much of his tenure. That is the reason for what amounts to a war cry of an address to the nation. Whether that will deliver the results he desires remains uncertain. While the Democrats including the Vice President Joseph Biden cheered the speech lustily all the way through, the Republicans led by the House Speaker John Boehner maintained stony faces most of the time, except when the president delivered homilies to the cause of equality for women, sacrifices of the armed forces and most notably, reworking tax credits to bring jobs back home. That made many analysts wonder whether the renewed agenda was dead in the water despite Mr Obama’s express commitment to it.
The speech also has implications for the mid-term elections in November 2014 for all the House seats and one-third of the Senate. Obviously, Mr Obama had remarkably short coat-tails even as he won re-election comfortably in 2012, much like the fictional President Josiah Bartlett, another liberal Democratic occupant of the White House whose trials and tribulations by a hostile Congress we get to watch nightly on the remarkable TV drama The West Wing. Both failed to enthuse popular support for Democratic candidates for the two houses of Congress.
The current consensus is that this situation has not improved significantly, leaving the Democratic fortunes in jeopardy. The American legislature will continue to be fractious and divided. Therefore, to expect that the American government functioning to be more harmonious in the remainder of the Obama term is perhaps premature. Issues requiring Congressional approval such as raising the public debt limit would yet again cause considerable difficulties to negotiate. To say that the world is not exactly sanguine about the U S economic leadership despite Mr Obama’s brave words to the effect that America is now the preferred global destination for investment for the first time in a decade is to state the obvious.
The one area which should give the rest of humanity a degree of comfort is the somewhat softer international line in the address. Mr Obama listed many trouble spots outside the U S and maintained that he will “continue to work with the international community to usher in …a future free of dictatorship, terror and fear. But he also expressed palpable relief at being able to end a twelve-year old war in Afghanistan. He intended to see through patiently the present negotiations with Iran and even threatened to veto possible moves for tougher sanctions against it in this period.
The remarkable feature of the speech was the president’s admirable gift of oratory. Mr Obama invoked the achievements of the last five years in glowing terms and redefined his unfinished tasks with eloquence. He brought in real people, a housewife who had lost her job even as she bought a new house, another who could afford a major medical procedure only because of Obamacare, and most moving of all, Sergeant First Class Corey Remsburg, a veteran combatant from Afghanistan recovering ever so slowly from near-fatal wounds following a bomb explosion. All of that brought much applause, at times from both sides of the aisle. Perhaps that is why even the former Republican Speaker of the House and an arch conservative Newt Gingrich called it a very rousing speech.
Similarly beleaguered Indian politicians could well learn a few lessons from the American president.