GOP is melting down: The real SOTU story
The president's speech was a conciliatory, modest affair. But with enemies like these, it's hard not to be a winner
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Rand Paul (Credit: CNN)
President
Obama’s staff hyped his State of the Union address as promising a bold
new reliance on executive action, and really, who could blame the guy?
Tuesday came the bizarre news that there were going to be four – four —
different GOP replies to the State of the Union address. To work with
the GOP Obama would need actual leaders, and instead he’s dealing with
hundreds of freelance potentates and kooks.
Meanwhile, waiting for the president on the floor, Rep. Joe “You lie” Wilson snapped pictures of Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson, who also frolicked with Rep. Paul Ryan. The GOP is splintering in real time, and that’s a bigger story than anything the president said in his 70-minute address. Sen. Rand Paul even gave what was billed as “the Rand Paul response” — as though he’s his own political party, and maybe he is — in which he billed African American GOP columnist Star Parker as the answer to poverty. (More on that in a second.)
Still, there was a strange disconnect between what the president’s advance people advanced, and what he actually said. Obama did announce one bold decision that will actually change lives: an executive order to increase the minimum wage for federal contract workers. But for a speech that was promoted by staff as a bold take-charge moment for a president tired of being thwarted by the GOP, and derided in advance as the equivalent of a martial law declaration by the right, it was unexpectedly conciliatory and short on promised proposals for action.
Apart from the minimum wage order, Obama mostly outlined a bully-pulpit approach to the next year: He’s “pulling together” all sorts of “new partnerships” and “summits” and “calling on Congress” and “cutting red tape” and proposing a new federally backed type of IRA called, yes, myRa. Obama may have talked toughest to his fellow Democrats in the Senate when he promised, appropriately, to veto a bill that would tighten sanctions on Iran.
Another SOTU leak revealed an internal split over whether Obama should stress “income inequality” or “opportunity,” and revealed that “opportunity” won because apparently income inequality is a big downer and sounds like class warfare. In the end, the president did mention income inequality while stressing “ladders of opportunity,” but the preliminary hype made me more sensitive to his disappointing storytelling: Obama blamed the decline of opportunity and the rise of inequality on “massive shifts in technology and global competition,” but left out the deliberate shift of wealth and power from the majority to the top 1 percent, and the deliberate dismantling of “ladders of opportunity” that began under Ronald Reagan and continue through today.
Meanwhile, waiting for the president on the floor, Rep. Joe “You lie” Wilson snapped pictures of Duck Dynasty’s Willie Robertson, who also frolicked with Rep. Paul Ryan. The GOP is splintering in real time, and that’s a bigger story than anything the president said in his 70-minute address. Sen. Rand Paul even gave what was billed as “the Rand Paul response” — as though he’s his own political party, and maybe he is — in which he billed African American GOP columnist Star Parker as the answer to poverty. (More on that in a second.)
Still, there was a strange disconnect between what the president’s advance people advanced, and what he actually said. Obama did announce one bold decision that will actually change lives: an executive order to increase the minimum wage for federal contract workers. But for a speech that was promoted by staff as a bold take-charge moment for a president tired of being thwarted by the GOP, and derided in advance as the equivalent of a martial law declaration by the right, it was unexpectedly conciliatory and short on promised proposals for action.
Apart from the minimum wage order, Obama mostly outlined a bully-pulpit approach to the next year: He’s “pulling together” all sorts of “new partnerships” and “summits” and “calling on Congress” and “cutting red tape” and proposing a new federally backed type of IRA called, yes, myRa. Obama may have talked toughest to his fellow Democrats in the Senate when he promised, appropriately, to veto a bill that would tighten sanctions on Iran.
Another SOTU leak revealed an internal split over whether Obama should stress “income inequality” or “opportunity,” and revealed that “opportunity” won because apparently income inequality is a big downer and sounds like class warfare. In the end, the president did mention income inequality while stressing “ladders of opportunity,” but the preliminary hype made me more sensitive to his disappointing storytelling: Obama blamed the decline of opportunity and the rise of inequality on “massive shifts in technology and global competition,” but left out the deliberate shift of wealth and power from the majority to the top 1 percent, and the deliberate dismantling of “ladders of opportunity” that began under Ronald Reagan and continue through today.
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Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large and the author of "What's the Matter With White People: Finding Our Way in the Next America."
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