The POTUS Position: Obama's State of the Union Address
"We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our own ambitions."
-- President Obama (State of the Union Address, 1/27/2010)
Pretty good speech from the President last night. I wouldn't say it struck me as too different from his previous speeches, at least in format and tone. Of course, he is a magnificent orator: smart but not overbearing, serious but playful, parental but not scolding. He tends to cast out a lot of policy buckshot in his speeches, and last night was no exception. I always get this vague feeling that every Obama address is like a fresh beginning, a series of "we need to start...."(s). And while that is a great style for campaigning, it's starting to wear thin as he gets further into his term. But that's just a minor, stylistic quibble, for now. Let's get into the speech itself.
These are my general observations on the address, from watching last night and reviewing the text this morning. There were four recurring points that Obama scattered through the whole thing. These are different than the overall ideological structure, which we'll get to later. These are just nuggets that kept popping up.
- Reprimands on Partisan Gridlock -- By my rough count, Obama lectured Congress on the evils of partisan bickering, grandstanding, and obstruction almost 20 times. While he mentioned that both parties were at fault, he clearly noted that the Republicans bear the brunt of the responsibility. He especially called them out for their supermajority shenanigans. He also reminded his own party that they still have large majorities in both houses, and that they need to man-up and get things done. I thought this trope was the strongest part of the speech. Obama came off as the serious adult in a room of embarrassed but snickering children, and the best line of the night was the one that sits at the top of this posting. The President has been relentlessly hammered from his own party for hewing to his bipartisan approach amidst the serial rebuffs of the GOP. But to his credit, Obama stuck to his guns last night, maintaining that he will not give up on building bridges to the Republican side of the aisle. Of course, when your general policies are pro-corporate and neoliberal, that makes it much easier to hold hands with your plutocratic buddies in the other party. But that's another issue. Suffice it to say, Obama came off as supremely Presidential in his scolds on hyper-partisanship.
- Reminders of Bills in Progress -- Several times, and slightly related to the reprimands mentioned above, the President reminded the people that many of the strategies he was proposing (jobs bill, climate bill, green energy investment, etc.) had already been passed by the House, but had not been acted on by the Senate, or had reached some other impasse in the legislative process. By doing this, he is informing the American people that he can only do so much as an executive -- it is the legislative branch that must actually craft the laws that implement policies. Obama has done this in the past, but he was particularly effective last night. Again, he was positioning himself as the adult in the discussion, prodding Congress to stop f'ing around and start delivering on the promises.
- Wall Street Bashing -- Many commentators were expecting, or maybe just hoping, that Obama would go whole-hog populist and ramp up the rhetoric against Wall Street, to take advantage of national sentiment. But while Obama did take some early digs, comparing the bank bailout to root canal surgery, it was not a theme that wound through the speech. Instead, he kept reminding us that the large banks are absolutely necessary for a properly-functioning economy. And while they are in need of re-regulation and reform, and need to be balanced by a robust community banking sector, they cannot just be scapegoated and destroyed to satisfy popular bloodlust. Now, depending on how cynical you are, you can see this one of two ways: it's either a mark of Obama's intellectual maturity and courage, sticking to his overall conception of the national economy; or, it's a comforting sop to the very institutions that helped bankroll his campaign. Either way, Obama did a fairly masterful job of starting off with Wall Street jibes, but then subtly weaving the banking sector back into the story as a crucial part of economic recovery.
- Tax Cuts -- Many thought that jobs jobs jobs was going to be the refrain in the State of the Union. But instead, what we got was tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. I stopped keeping count after a while, but I would bet that tax cuts or tax credits were mentioned over 30 times. Again, you could see this cynically, as an absolutely necessary response to the free-floating Scott Brown-type anxiety swirling around over bailouts and government waste, or holistically, as part of his overall ideological understanding of the American economy (more on that below). Really, it's just a blending of the two. It defuses some of the populist conservative anger, and it fits in perfectly with the wonkish, neoliberal agenda.
So those were the recurring thematic nuggets that I noticed in the speech last night. But when you start looking at the ideological framework of the whole address, as well as the nitty-gritty substance of policy recommendations, things start to get murky. Stylistically and strategically, Obama's speech was brilliant, as usual. He set the right tone, communicated equally well to both the Congress and the wider American citizenry, and generally reset his short time in office within the larger context of general trends from the previous decades.
But what is the President's real understanding of the causes of and the solutions to the current recession? And what is his overall ideological picture of how labor, compensation, and economic development interact? At the very beginning of the speech, Obama makes this observation: "This recession has also compounded the burdens that America's families have been dealing with for decades -- the burden of working harder and longer for less." Now, this little gloss on declining wages appears within a larger description of other forms of economic decay, and a key indicator of Obama's view on class inequality is that he never returns to this theme that real household income and wealth have been steadily declining for decades, despite improved worker productivity.
In a previous set of posts on the Future of Work, I made the argument that this decoupling of wages from productivity, which actually began in the 1970s, is a crucial part of the massive shift of wealth away from the broader middle class to the corporate/investor elite. And as Les Leopold noted in his seminal book The Looting of America, this capture of wealth by a small elite is the main creator of the serial bubbles that the American economy has gone through in the last 20 years. It's really that simple. The American economy has been growing and growing, and workers have been improving their productivity, but the fruits of that economic success have been funneled upwards to a small number of beneficiaries. This excess capital then gets loaned back to the workers who created it, at exorbitant rates of interest, or it gets plowed into exotic and risky financial instruments that eventually unravel and collapse into dust. And of course, all along the way, huge executive salaries are sucked out of the system and whisked away to individual bank accounts (domestic and abroad), never to return.
There are other factors involved in the mass transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the elite: the legal evolution of the corporation, technological unemployment and the de-skilling of labor, globalization and the offshoring of manufacturing, the hyper-sophistication of financial instruments made possible by computerization, etc. But there can be no mistaking the overall effect: inequalities in wealth and power are the most important political and social issues, for they are the root of almost every other problem with which we are dealing. Class warfare must be acknowledged, embraced, and waged. It's that simple. The more we tap dance around appalling facts like this [The top 1% of Americans control more wealth than the bottom 90%], the more we will spin our wheels.
What makes this situation even more intractable is that our mainstream politicians cannot talk about this class inequality, because one of the main features of this concentration of power is the capture of government itself by these same interests. With our winner-take-all electoral structure and loose campaign finance laws (made looser last week by the ridiculous Supreme Court decision on corporate funding of ads), the elite corporate and investor classes have literally become our government. It's not that the "special interests" have too much control over our government. They are our government. The Congress and the Executive branch are entirely made up of corporate lawyers and businesspeople, mostly rich ones. They fund each others' elections, then gerrymander the districts to ensure universal incumbent reelection. They come from and return to the lobbyshops and corporate boardrooms, writing each others' legislation and funding each others' pet projects. And on and on.
In short, it's very difficult for any national politician to long preserve the image of a true outsider, since by the time they get to the national stage, they have already been vetted, funded, and trained by the prevailing elite that controls the entire electoral process in the first place. This is why we only get pro-business, neoliberal, pro-growth politicians. All other dissenting points of view are weeded out at the beginning, starved for funds and necessary corporate media coverage.
From this perspective, one can see how ultimately anemic Obama's overall approach to the economy is. When he turned to the discussion of jobs and how to create them, we were right back into the eternal laundry list of policy approaches: a jobs bill (not much substance on what exactly is in this jobs bill), $30 billion for small banks to loan to small businesses, a green energy bill, a climate bill, new plants and equipment investment, financial regulation, funding for science research and innovation, an export initiative, trade bills, school loan reform, mortgage refinancing, and of course, health care reform.
Now, even though the general response to the speech has been positive, I find myself throwing my hat in with conservatives when I see yet another smorgasbord of programs like the ones mentioned above. I understand their perspective that this model puts too much of the economy's success into the hands of centralized bureaucracies. It just sounds like more spending on more stuff, even despite Obama's pledge to cut taxes and freeze discretionary government spending for three years (who thinks that's actually going to happen?). The guy is smart, to be sure, but his speeches tend towards a wonkish posturing, a rattling off of big ideas that will likely never materialize into improved conditions on the ground. No matter how lofty the intentions, top-down programs run by a centralized corporate elite are not likely to accrue many benefits to the regular guy on the street.
Behind all of these programs, I believe, is a flawed model of what our civilization could and should be. It is the conventional view of most of the political and corporate elite, to be sure, but that doesn't make it any less deficient. Basically the stance is that economic growth is good; it is government's job to foster economic growth on the macro-level, and allow individuals and families to reap the rewards on the micro-level. The government should thus help all businesses grow, by creating incentives towards investment in human and physical capital. Government is also responsible for maintaining an overall atmosphere of fairness and accountability in the markets, by providing regulation and oversight to prevent big players from abusing citizens. Other supporting frameworks for economic growth that are maintained by the government are education and national security.
This whole ideological system is so commonplace now amongst our political and media elite, that it's hard to see how ultimately empty it is. The country is essentially viewed as one large, harmonious machine for churning out economic growth. Education makes better workers, better workers make more money, more money means more investment, more investment means more jobs, more job mean more stuff, more stuff means happier people, happier people do whatever happy people do. At no point do truly important and interesting things come into play for consideration, and the controlling metaphors are never challenged. For example, endless economic growth inside a finite natural system is a tragic absurdity, and the unraveling of every major natural system on the planet is ample evidence of that madness. Or, how about the growing evidence that the One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling social form is profoundly unsatisfying psychologically, resulting in epidemic levels of depression, anxiety, obesity, domestic violence, and drug addiction? Or the continued systematic disenfranchisement of African Americans, especially men, administered by a bogus drug enforcement policy that hides economic superfluity under the guise of criminality, giving us the largest prison population in the world?
In essence, the evidence is mounting that there will be no return to our old way of life, with full employment and maximum consumption and college for all. The lesson of the recession should be that too much of our prior economic activity was devoted to just keeping the system itself going. People served at the whim of the economy, not the other way around. We overworked and overspent, much of it just to distract ourselves from how dehumanized our social and natural environments had become.
Business interests are not the same as human interests. We are not part of a massive, harmonious machine where profit and work and economic growth all fit together in a neat little package. Freedom does not equal more stuff to choose from, and more stuff does not bring us fulfillment.
OK, I've already rambled on way too long, so I'll close with some great words from Michael Lind, in the latest issues of The Baffler.
But in the late twentieth century, the language of the corporate boardroom and the consulting firm replaced the language of Lockean republicanism. The individual was a firm, and the child was a start-up. Teachers were venture capitalists tasked with the mission of how best to invest "human capital" in a classroom full of fledgling enterprises competing with billions of other human firms in the new, borderless global marketplace.
Never mind that in reality, four-fifths of the U.S. workforce toils in the domestic service sector, engaged in activities that can only be performed in the United States and are immune to foreign competition. Never mind that, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the jobs to be created within our borders require only a high school education plus brief on-the-job training. To continue in the vein of our age's overmastering marketing rhetoric, policymakers regard such data as lagging indicators. In the financialized discourse of post-Cold War America, the human capitalist has supplanted the citizen, to be equipped with tools by the investor-state and then sent out to flourish of fail in competition with legions of unseen rivals in the new global economy.... We have witnessed the financialization not only of the American economy but also of the American mind.
Michael Lind, "The O-Word" (The Baffler, Vol 2, No 1)
As great an orator as Obama is, we should recognize that he is but the most eloquent advocate of this worldview. I believe the strands of this social form are coming apart, and our paramount task as a nation is to either create something completely new or suffer the protracted buffeting of entropic collapse.
Posted by Jeremy Raymondjack at 1/28/2010 10:23 AM 
Categories: Politics and Economics
Tags: presidential address state of the union address barack obama
Categories: Politics and Economics
Tags: presidential address state of the union address barack obama
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