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David Faris on SOTU: No-drama Obama returns
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David Faris on SOTU: No-drama Obama returns
A funny thing happened last night. For months I've been looking everywhere for this thing that I lost. I turned over seat cushions, rifled through drawers, upended furniture. Then I turned on Hulu and there it was â the president that I voted for last November, the guy for whom I spent hours and hours walking around West Philly knocking on doors, and whose victory my neighborhood celebrated with an all-hours, bongo-banging, community-bridging, trolley-stopping Baltimore Avenue rager.
Man, I fucking looked everywhere for that guy!
It was good to see him again, and if there's one thing you can take away from last night's State of the Union, it's that Barack Obama gives good speech. If he were president of a debating society, he'd have 90% approval ratings. I'd pay to watch the guy read out of the phone book. And if he could govern by teleprompter, I'd already be using my public insurance option.
Unfortunately, when he steps away from the podium, Obama seems inclined to leave governance in the stone hands of his largely useless party leaders, who have made such a mess of health care reform that they are in danger of losing their enormous congressional majorities this fall. Mistake one was clearly investing his political capital with Harry Reid's investment firm, which turned around and gambled the principal on Joe Lieberman's Connecticut Default Swaps.
Obama's problem so far is that he has governed in a way that pleases effectively no one â not this base, not centrists (who don't like the health care bill), and certainly not conservatives. In fairness, Obama could personally sign every piece of the official GOP platform into law, and the Fox News crowd would still hate him and ask to see his birth certificate every few minutes.
Last night was Obama's attempt to right the ship â to reassure the base that the administration's progressive goals remain in sight, and to regain the trust of centrists put off by the Landrieu Purchase and other unsavory elements of health care reform. And at its best, Obama's speech was a forceful defense of his administration's policies.
He defended the bank bailout while still holding the titans of Wall Street to account for their role in the financial crisis. "If these firms can afford to hand out big bonuses again, they can afford a modest fee to pay back the taxpayers who rescued them in their time of need." He defended a foreign policy increasingly unpopular with his party's base. Doing so unapologetically can only win him admiration even from those who disagree with the policies.
The only moment anyone really cared about, in the wake of the Martha Coakley fiasco, came when Obama turned to health care. Observers expected him to retreat from the bill, at least a little bit, to give himself and his party some political breathing room. But instead he launched a full-throated defense of the reform on the table, and called on Congress to pass it. "Do not walk away from reform,â he told the attendant legislators. He told the crowd of GOP obstructionists and nihilists that if they had a better idea, they were welcome to bring it to the table.
If only he could have called out Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman by name, the two disgusting insurance company sycophants more responsible than anyone else for derailing reform, who were conveniently seated next to each other in what one commentator called "the axis of weasel.â Certain niceties, alas, had to be observed.
In perhaps the finest moment of the speech, he told Congress, "To Democrats, I would remind you that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills.â It was a refreshing signal that we won't be getting Bill Clinton's second term â school uniforms, blowjob scandals, and the kind of vanilla presidency that gets you 65% approval ratings without achieving a single damn thing.
One feeling you get from all this, though, is that the guy's going to have to stop putting out political brushfires with speech water. It's one thing to right the campaign ship with a well-time and thoughtful speech, as Obama did with the Reverend Wright affair. It's another to confuse speechmaking with policymaking, or to believe that one can effectively substitute for the other.
In other words, actions twist more arms in the Democratic caucus than words. The problem with the health care bill isn't that Obama isn't delivering good enough speeches, it's that reform was left out in the cornfield like a scarecrow, and predictably got picked at.
So if last night was Obama rushing out of the White House with a shotgun to scare away the birds, that would be awesome. But along with a number of increasingly disillusioned supporters, l'll believe it when I see it.
My thoughts on the Obama SOTU: Obama - STFU (please).
Thought that was pretty clever, eh, Sally?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Philly City Paper and Philly News Now, Yancey @YanceyG. Yancey @YanceyG said: David Faris on SOTU: No-drama Obama returns: A funny thing happened last night. For months I've been looking every... http://bit.ly/diskqB [...]
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