I just had a chance to sit down and actually read through the transcript of President Obama’s third State of the Union address. Now, before contribute my opinion on the content of the speech, I want to clarify something: I identify as a liberal. I voted for Barack Obama in 2008. I’m a pretty big supporter of a lot of his policy decisions, and a great fan of the many good deeds he has accomplished, or at least attempted to accomplish, within his first term. Hell, I’d be kidding myself if I said I wasn’t going to vote for the man in 2012. I will.
Having said that… I’ll present some of my thoughts on the content of the address.
The President opened with an acknowledgment of the hard work, dedication, and commitment of our men and women in uniform. It was an appropriate and well deserved nod, given that we’ve been asking so much of a service spread too thin in two needless wars over the course of the past decade. The list of achievements that followed was to be expected, as it is an election year, and this is in effect his first stump speech. And one could also expect the analogy that followed, asking us to “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.” He describes the potential in the practice of banding together selflessly in the interest of propelling our country into a less divided future (an obvious knock at our shamefully divided, oppositional, and perpetually stalemated Congress).
President Obama then shared an anecdote about his grandparent’s experience during the everyone-does-their-fair-share mentality of World War II, and informed us that, by the precedent set by how America pulled itself up by the bootstraps in the post-war era, we would do the same.
This is a nice sentiment. A lot of people that I have discussed this issue with share the same positive outlook by looking to the past in order to find a template for how we should proceed as a nation. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s an appropriate analogy. At all.
The America that has been glorified through 50+ years of cultural outlets – movies, television, media, etc – is based on the unrealistic expectation of infinite growth. We exited World War II with heavy losses, sure, but we were fortunate enough to not have suffered any major damage to our national infrastructure. There were no great battles (equivalent to the ones fought in Europe and the Pacific) fought here. So while the rest of the developed world lay in ruins, we got busy selling… everything. We were without competition for YEARS. Decades, even. Of course we became the most prosperous nation on the planet.
That might seem a bit irrelevant while discussing the topic at hand. I would argue, however, that it is the crux of the problem with our entire political system. We are expecting infinite growth in every arena of our culture. This isn’t Leave it to Beaver, this is Wall Street. We are a culture obsessed. If it isn’t growing, it’s dead.
Again, “How does it relate?”
This speech, while I’m not trying to knock the President because I DO like and support him, is a good representation of how our entire political system works.
Values. Liberty. Freedom.
We live in a culture where you get full credit for writing the title on the page. It doesn’t quite matter if the rest of the page is blank, or filled with antonymous content. As long as our leaders are standing in front of us and giving the word of the day, we cheer like the furniture in Pee Wee’s Playhouse.
These words, more and more, seem hollow to me. I think President Obama is doing his best, and I honestly believe he genuinely means what he says. It’s just that we have a system in place that tacitly states that in order to GET to where you would have the ability to affect change… you must submit to a myriad of corporations and interest groups and lobbyists to be able to AFFORD to get there.
By the time a well-respected, honest, and passionate politician such as President Obama got into the White House, he was beholden to the board room. Now you could argue that, once in office, the President could simply go on about his business. Right? Well, not if that meant going against the wishes of the very deep pockets of his contributors, who could then in turn vote against him in the next election with the absence of funds in his campaign… and the addition of funds to his competitor. It’s not personal, folks. It’s business.
Which is precisely the problem.
The rest of the speech, as far as proposed policy changes go, was positive. There were a lot of great ideas presented. I fully support things like removing the tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, job training for the unemployed, addressing the issue of the skyrocketing cost of college tuition, and the renewal in our investment in alternative energy sources. All wonderful ideas.
It would be wonderful if I heard these phrases again before the next State of the Union address.
Instead, it seems that we’ll continue down a path where we hold up international developments like the Arab Spring, a widespread movement of political distress in response to decades of oppression, as proof of our shining example of democracy on the world stage… and then completely fail to mention… ONCE… that, for months, your entire country was covered in the biggest populist movement since the 1960’s. And in response? We pass legislation that declares America as a battleground, and allows the military to, in effect, shut down any and all protests without question.
Nice job, America.
The President is spot on when he says that, “Washington is broken”. Unfortunately for us, this seems to be the new form of political dialogue. It seems that everyone in Washington is now the “outsider” crying foul on the rest of the political community. President Obama, in my opinion, is doing a lot more than most to address this, and I appreciate that. I just don’t think that we currently have a system in place in which one man or women, or even an entire political party, could do away with the level of corruption that is inherent in the way we choose our leaders. And that is, ultimately, what they are. We do not have representation. We have leaders. Leaders with stockholders and boardrooms to which they answer.
Having said all that… I will close by saying, again, that I’m a supporter of the President. I think he’s doing the best he can. It’s just a shame we’ve let the system get so bad that a leader with SUCH potential is bound by so much red tape and the weight of decades of corruption upon his back.
It’s a shame.
