President Obama in Boise, ID, this week.
President Barack Obama embarked on his final campaign this week and it has nothing to do with 2016. To be sure, he has launched several hand grenades into the 2016 campaign field that are already vexing Republicans. “America’s New Congress,” led by the GOP, is now playing small-ball on almost every front.
They’re trying to pass a Keystone XL bill that promises to bring 35 permanent, full-time jobs to the country. It’s a sham, but more to the point, it’s so last term. Their efforts on immigration are purely reactive—tripping over themselves to undo the president’s initiatives while simultaneously painting themselves into an electoral corner. And on abortion this week, they managed to thread the needle of mutually offending pro-life true believers along with sane women everywhere who want to make their own health decisions. But again, the fight over abortion—which admittedly rages on today—is so last century.
This week, Republicans were seemingly light years behind Obama as he laid out the elements of an economic agenda that, by all accounts, he hopes will be a part of his legacy. In terms of the fundamentals like job creation, investment, and private sector growth, the president reported back at the State of the Union address to the people who twice hired him: mission accomplished. And with his pitch for middle-class economics, Obama launched an unabashed effort to re-stack the deck in favor of those for whom the deck has never been stacked.
Yet Obama seemed to be grappling with something deeper than a legacy—something more basic than advancing a populist framework or shaping the 2016 dialogue. He seemed to be wrestling with his own demons on the one mission that has completely eluded him even as he occupied the highest office in the land: bringing the nation together.
“I still believe that we are one people,” Obama stressed in Tuesday's speech, stretching out "believe" as if struggling to hold on to a treasured memory. He seemed nostalgic for the person he was and perhaps the potential he saw more than a decade ago when he told America from a stage in Boston that we were “more than a collection of red states and blue states."
Please read below the fold for more of Obama's message.
Because at the moment, we are exactly that: a collection of reds and blues that seem ever more isolated from each other. Our politics have grown measurably more divided. Last year, for instance, Pew research noted that now “almost four-in-ten (38 percent) politically engaged Democrats are consistent liberals, up from just 8 percent in 1994." The same is true for conservatives. We also geographically self-select who our peers will be, making us a nation of ideological islands. Washington is merely a reflection of our inability and aversion to engaging with each other. So this week, the president re-committed himself to the campaign for common ground he has yet to win.
"I still believe that together, we can do great things, even when the odds are long," he said from the dais.
Barack Obama has always been a great campaigner. He's more at ease lecturing than listening, and progressives have been the recipients of those lectures as often as conservatives have.
In his first term, the president told immigration activists that he couldn't stop deportations on his own authority—“I am not a king,” he said repeatedly—an assertion that has come back to haunt him. He routinely told queer activists eager to repeal "don't ask, don't tell" that they should direct their anger at Republicans, even though Democrats controlled both chambers of the 111th Congress and he was setting the agenda. More recently, he counseled patience to a group of #blacklivesmatter activists who visited him in the Oval Office in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests.
But patience is not a salve for people in distress—just ask any of the groups above. And the president, through his intellect, has a tendency to think he knows better. In fact, there's a vulnerability to not having the answers, not having the quick comeback, that the president doesn't seem to be comfortable with.
He does, however, appear to be listening now. The middle class is the foundation of this country and it's in distress—it’s hemorrhaging. Someone needs to do something. The question is, can President Obama actually facilitate a conversation that draws everyone into the fray—not simply to snipe at each other, but to have a dialogue, to engage with each other, and to eventually come to a series of imperfect agreements that nonetheless propel us forward as a nation? It’s a long-term proposition that people all along the political spectrum are sure to be ambivalent about, but it seems a necessary evil.
The problem for President Obama is that part of what he’s competing against here are his own instincts. Not Hillary Clinton. Not even the Republicans. If he wants to facilitate a conversation among the American people, he must be willing to have an exchange that’s far more delicate than the slugfest of a campaign, where you perpetually trade blows with your opponent until someone lands a knockout punch. In a slugfest, I’d bet on the president against the Republicans every time. At least when it comes to campaigning.
But here, President Obama will need to resist the temptation to gloat even when the other side is taunting him and even when he is right. He can’t remind people that, yes, there were two elections and “I won both of ‘em.” Not if he hopes to engage anyone who isn't already on his side.
This week, it’s been easy to divide the winners from the losers along partisan lines. The Republicans unraveled before our very eyes, while President Obama coined the term 'middle-class economics' that could potentially be remembered for years to come. But the president appears to be striving for something more profound than an accounting of points.
On Tuesday night, it was apparent that when Barack Obama arrived on the national political stage in 2004, what he delivered was much more than just a speech to him. It was the Holy Grail he went in search of but still hasn’t found.