It was the last hurrah of a president now in his eighth and last year in office — a tumultuous year characterized by a pessimistic national mood and a polarized electorate ready to replace him in the White House. And lest we forget, reportedly no less than 70 percent of Americans today believe that the country is moving in the “wrong direction.”
To watch President Obama give his State of the Union address last Tuesday was to be reminded of how the man’s rhetoric that he evinced in his 2008 campaign, still moves us by its eloquence. His message to Americans that night was that there is no need to lose hope in the future or to focus on the worst aspects of one’s objective reality — America is still the “most powerful nation on earth” and remains ascendant (“the rest of the world does not look to Beijing or Moscow to lead, but to us”), with more jobs, more innovation and more mobility.
“We live in a time of extraordinary change, change that’s reshaping the way we live, the way we work ... and our place in the world,” he said. But that change, it now appears, has come to be seen by many Americans as a problem, for it has triggered a virulent streak in the political discourse that goes against the grain of American values — clearly a shot across the bow at Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner and standard bearer, whose anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant rhetoric has, sadly, hit a chord among many Republican voters.
“When politicians insult Muslims, whether abroad or our fellow citizens, when a mosque is vandalized, or a kid bullied, that doesn’t make us safer.”
Then, evoking a colloquialism from the 1960s, he added: “That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. It betrays who we are as a country.”
The applause line in the chamber to this posture by the president was not, as you would have expected, little and subdued but sustained and loud, which must mean that Trump’s nativist sentiments do not resonate with the majority of Republican legislators. Heck, who wants a demagogue in the White House?
In short, Obama’s speech, to quote The New York Times in its editorial on Wednesday, was a “call to America’s better nature.” Or, as the Washington Post’s astute commentator, Dana Milbank, put it in his column that same day, a “sermon to the nation.”
A State of the Union address, typically presented by a president every year he is in office to a joint session of Congress, not only allows the chief executive to define the country’s national priorities and outline his legislative agenda, but an address that is required by Article II of the constitution, which requires the executive to “inform Congress on the state of the union.”
Normally, every member of Congress can bring one guest to the event, and the president, along with the First Lady, may invite up to 24 guests in his box. One of Obama’s foreign guests this year was a 55-year-old Syrian refugee called Rifai Hamo, who had had seven of his family members in 2013 killed by a Syrian government anti-personnel missile. (That beats the invitation extended to the late Ahmed Chalabi, the mercurial Iraqi leader who conned the neocons, and whom the world saw sitting next to First Lady Laura Bush at President George W. Bush’s 2004 address.)
Historically, the State of the Union address has been quite a platform for presidents. President James Monroe, for example, used it in 1823 to advance the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that further efforts by European nations to colonize land or interfere in North or South America would be viewed as an “act of aggression” — truly a defining moment in the US foreign policy. In 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the Second Bill of Rights, since the political rights guaranteed by the constitution had presumably “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.”
In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson introduced legislation that would come to be known as The War on Poverty — officially, The Economic Opportunity Act — to combat a then national poverty rate of 19 percent.
And in his 2002 address, President George W. Bush identified North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq by the now quaint — but in its time, provocative — moniker, “the axis of evil,” countries that presumably represented significant threats to the US.
Over the last seven years, Barack Obama may not have lived up to his dazzling 2008 rhetoric, been a great president or even grown with his job. Yet, he readily admits to his failures, certainly in the sphere of foreign policy, say, in Palestine and Syria. “The things I’ve done during the campaign,” he told NBC News earlier this week, “I have not done well as president.” But I say he redeemed himself during his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, especially when he declaimed: “Americans need to reject any politics that targets people because of race or religion. This isn’t a matter of political correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The world respects us not just for our arsenal, it respects us for our diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.”
Trump, Cruz and Rubio supporters, are you listening?
