Somewhere, Bill Clinton is smil ing.
After demonizing Clinton’s trian gulation of politics during his terms, President Obama was forced in his State of the Union speech last night to mimic the last Democratic president by pivoting away from his grand health-care agenda toward a focus primarily on relieving the burden on middle-class families and creating jobs.
The speech’s theme was “Rescue, Rebuild, Restore — A New Foundation for Prosperity.”
One thing is for sure: Obama is feeling American’s pain. Unlike Clinton, he got a wake-up call prior to his first mid-term election with the victory in Massachusetts of Scott Brown — who ran as the man who would single-handedly thwart Obama’s plan to overhaul the American health-care system.
That gave the president a chance to retool before experiencing a massive wipeout of his party in Congress.
The centerpiece of Obama’s speech was a new “jobs bill” chock full of tax cuts and goodies for small businesses. Which raises an obvious question: What took so long?
Obama’s speech was robust and as specific as these things get, but the last year of economic disaster and joblessness hung over it like a dark cloud. Why wasn’t his first priority a jobs bill? Why health care?
But Obama won’t give on that issue. Even though a new USA Today/Gallup poll showed 55 percent of Americans saying Congress should suspend work on the current health-care bills and start over, Obama asked people to “take another look” at the bill, as if that’s going to change their minds. (In fact, this suggests that most people have taken a “first look” at the bill, which they haven’t.)
Americans have turned against the bill based on the White House’s inability to explain what it’s doing, and its having allowed opponents to hijack the debate with claims of death panels and socialized medicine. Then it let the bill get so watered down that it lost the liberal base — and nothing Obama said last night on that topic will woo them back.
The president seemed to be making excuses for the ineptness of his White House, rather than taking responsibility. He claimed that, “When you try to make big changes, it causes controversies.” What “big” changes? The only major issue the White House has taken on is health care — and it caused all the controversies. There was the wheeling and dealing with the pharmaceutical companies and the “bribing” of senators to get their votes.
There was of course the “death panel” controversy that the White House staff recently admitted they were flat-footed on because they didn’t think anyone would listen to Sarah Palin — the most popular Republican in the country right now.
Obama gets credit in my book for standing by his economic-recovery plan and the unpopular bailouts, but the government spending freeze is a bomb all the way around (which is probably why about three people applauded when he announced it). Liberals hate it since they believe what we need is more spending to get out of the recession; Republicans hate it because it is too limited, and independents are too smart to fall for such a transparent gimmick.
If there was a laugh line, it was when Obama complained, “We can’t wage a perpetual campaign” — implying that others, not he, were guilty of that. Everything in the speech was geared toward wooing back the independents who are fleeing the Democratic Party at an alarming rate. Obama is transparently campaigning for himself and for members of his party, who have a mid-term election bearing down on them.
A recent Gallup survey showed that State of the Union speeches rarely raise a president’s approval rating. The exception to this rule was Bill Clinton, who saw an average 3 percent approval rise from his annual speeches.
Which is probably why Obama, who has worked hard to be the un-Clinton, mimicked his post-1994 tactics.
Oh, the irony.