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Wednesday, Jan 21, 2015 7:15 PM UTC
Bye-bye, Reagan conservatism: Why Obama’s speech was more significant than it seems
The president's State of the Union pushed back on '80s conservatism and '90s neoliberalism -- offering this instead
Topics: Barack Obama, State of the Union, sotu, 2015, The Left, Democrats, GOP, The Right, Editor's Picks, Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Media News, News, Politics News
In advance of the president’s big address on Tuesday night, a bored and restless pundit class began to convince itself that Obama’s final State of the Union as the unquestioned chief of his party would really be about the next presidential campaign — and, more specifically, “boxing in” his increasingly likely successor as the Dem nominee, Hillary Rodham Clinton. At the time, this struck me as an odd prediction, and one that said more about pundits than Obama. The president is not without his shortcomings, of course. But when it comes to understanding his actions, an overzealous focus on the short term has only rarely been at play.
As was clear to everyone who watched Obama’s performance on Tuesday, or has read it online in the hours since, the president instead took quite the opposite approach. Rather than concern himself with the tactical minutiae of a race with no official top-tier candidates, and which is still nearly two years away, Obama spent the vast majority of his penultimate State of the Union making the kind of argument you usually expect to hear from a departing president: cataloging his victories and needling his critics. And to a significant degree, as I argued in my State of the Union preview, that was because the country he inherited after eight years of George W. Bush was in such rotten shape that Obama had little time to do more than stave off the next crisis.
But as much as the president’s address was characterized by a growing economy finally giving him a chance to say what he’d like to do with the fruits of his labor, the synoptic nature of the speech was also a consequence of Obama’s well-known preference for thinking about the “long game.” For the first time in more than six years, he had an opportunity to boast of changing the “trajectory” of the country like few presidents before him and none since Ronald Reagan. Crucially, he could do so while pointing to benefits that were tangible in the here and now, rather than being likely to occur in the indeterminate future, as has often been the case. He seized the opportunity, and made his case for what it would mean to be a citizen in the United States that Barack Obama helped make.
It sounds, I know, remarkably ambitious — even hubristic. Still, it’s a goal Obama’s never been particularly hesitant to share, despite the fact that his moderate demeanor and often self-consciously centrist policies don’t fit our expectations for how a guy trying to “fundamentally transform” a superpower acts. But when Obama talks about the long game, worrying less about whether a policy is a half loaf or a quarter loaf and looking instead at whether it pushes the political mainstream in his preferred direction is part of what he means. As an example, here’s how he put it in a press conference in 2010, defending his decision to agree to a temporary extension of George W. Bush’s high-income tax cuts: “Not everybody agrees with [liberals] … And so my job is to make sure that we have a North Star out there.”
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