By Steve Hynd
The conventional wisdom today seems to be that Obama's State of the Union speech last night (text) was a masterstroke of political framing, putting the GOP on the spot by challenging them to be more than a Party of No.
With both sides jockeying for leverage ahead of what promises to be brutal battle over the budget and government spending, the president had one over-arching goal as he took the podium: to convince a still-skeptical public that he has a strong plan to spur job growth and the economy, all while seeking to reframe the debate away from one narrowly focused on reducing the deficit and towards the need to invest in the future and maintain America's competitive strength.
I've a rather more pessimistic view on the likely success of that framing, echoing my colleague Dave:
Obama has just established the "left wing" budetary position as 'gentle austerity', so the flaming douchebags in the Senate will need their nice big round numbers of flesh to proclaim their distance from the dirty fucking hippies, and all of sudden $100 billion to Lieberman, another $75 billion in cuts to satisfy Nelson #1, and $50 billion for Nelson #2, $250 billion for the Maine Duo, and we are talking about a number far closer to $2 trillion than $1 trillion over ten years.
Or as Paul Krugman puts it: "that domestic spending freeze amounts to endorsing Republican arguments...We care about the future! But we don�t want to spend! Meh."
For myself, I didn't intend to watch the speech but ended up doing so anyway. I've recently found that it's best to read Obama's speeches, shorn of his own charisma - and even to imagine them as read by Tony Blair. That way, the rhetorical flourishes that sound great but mean nothing really shine through. And, for me, the bulk of last night's speech was exactly that - style over substance by a man who will say practically anything to get re-elected in 2012.
It's all very well for Obama to tell a room in which the average wealth was somewhere north of $6 million that "two years after the worst recession most of us have ever known, the stock market has come roaring back. Corporate profits are up. The economy is growing again." Bully for the fat cats! But where's the "trickle down"? And how will cutting the deficit help that happen? It's exactly as sensible as an unemployed person stopping spending money on bus fares to look for work so he can throw that meagre money at his bank debt. A far better idea is to keep getting on the bus, find a job and use the greater income to pay down the bank debt. What are we to do when the "family head" doesn't see that?
(Don't even get me started on the way Defense and Homeland Security still get a free pass on deep, meaningful cuts in spending. As Derrick Crowe says, we could cut spending overall and still invest for the future a lot easier if we weren't blowing $3 billion a week on a useless exercise in military vanity in Afghanistan.)
Obama says innovating, investing for the future, is this generation's "sputnik moment" and urges graduates to become teachers. Perhaps he'll explain why any scientist would want to be a teacher forced to teach Creationism alongside real science. I doubt it, though. In a week when the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded the recession was no accident:
The 2008 financial crisis was an �avoidable� disaster caused by widespread failures in government regulation, corporate mismanagement and heedless risk-taking by Wall Street...
The commission that investigated the crisis casts a wide net of blame, faulting two administrations, the Federal Reserve and other regulators for permitting a calamitous concoction: shoddy mortgage lending, the excessive packaging and sale of loans to investors and risky bets on securities backed by the loans.
�The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen this coming and thus nothing could have been done,� the panel wrote in the report�s conclusions, which were read by The New York Times. �If we accept this notion, it will happen again.�
...�The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire,� the report states. �The captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings and failed to question, understand and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble.�
Obama found himself able to utter these lines:
The rules have changed. In a single generation, revolutions in technology have transformed the way we live, work and do business. Steel mills that once needed 1,000 workers can now do the same work with 100.
Without mentioning that, while technological advancement has cut the numbers needed to work large industrial facilities, it wasn't technology that offshored the 100 jobs left per plant to China - it was corporate fat cats who saw their own incomes rise.
Until we can look clear-eyed at the failed neoliberal economics that stand behind Obama's ommission, I'm not optimistic about any "trickle down" for the poor and working people other than one that smells strongly of being pissed on.
Update: Looks like Dave was right about the GOP's reaction:
Republicans have moved quickly to reject US President Barack Obama's call for new public spending on research, infrastructure and education.
...Leading Republicans called for far deeper cuts in the budget than Mr Obama outlined.
"Freezing government spending for five years at the increased levels of the last two years is really not enough," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said.
House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Congress should look "at things that we can do right away to slash spending."
"We're going to have to force the budget down," he said on CBS News on Wednesday morning.
And Senator Jim DeMint, a leader of the anti-government tea party movement and one of the most conservative senators, declared voters had already rejected Mr Obama's approach to increased government spending.
"When the president says 'investment' he means bigger federal government and higher taxes," he said.
"Americans sent a clear message in the 2010 elections. They no longer wish to 'invest' in President Obama's big-spending plans."
The GOP's policy platform of helping their rich corporate pals at the expense of the poorest will continue unabated. Any trickle-down you experience will be preceeded by the sound of a zipper.
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