The pundit jury is coming in with a verdict about President Obama’s State of the Union speech and it’s generally positive. A former Bush speechwriter claims Obama plagiarized George W. Bush, but when the lines are compared it seems one more exaggeration typical of partisans on each side (here come the False Equivalency police at my door). Meanwhile, CNN’s instant polling found favorable reaction to Obama’s speech among a large chunk who watched (but noted that more Democrats watch Democratic Presidents speak and more Republicans watch Republican Presidents speak).
But the two best takes on the speech came from The Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman and CBS News Political Director John Dickerson who note that the well-delivered speech — delivered with such pizzazz, joy and almost buoyancy — could not mask one fact: Obama is now operating from a position of political weakness and a major constraint (the fact that Congressional Republicans aren’t about to cooperate with him). So he’s going “small” as part of a strategy.
Some excerpts and comments on Fineman’s piece which needs to be read in full:
Obama swung for the fences in his first term, and with success: he got reelected. But he whiffed disastrously last year, his administration reeling from spying controversies, Congressional confrontations and a botched rollout of Obamacare.
The result is a job-approval rating in the low-40s, the kind that can cripple a presidency by making the chief executive a political pariah.
So, as Obama laid out his 2014 plans in his State of the Union, he committed to what the major leagues call “small ball:” incremental executive branch maneuvers to aid the economy, with the aim of creating jobs and restoring the president’s standing.
In his State of the Union, he was looking to scratch out runs with singles, bunts and walks.
It’s a game plan borne of necessity, a shrewd assessment of the enemies, and the president’s own personal and political character. He is not a man who relishes confrontation.
Facing implacable opposition from Republicans on the Hill, Obama is choosing to go around them where he can. Knowing how unpopular he among the GOP base, he will shy away from table-pounding pronouncements that would only inflame the other side.
The White House strategy for 2014 is simple enough: ignore Congress (for the most part); be busy, purposeful, detail-oriented and reasonable; and hope that a rising tide of an improving economy will lift all boats -– including the president’s own.
According to Fineman, who also does solid reporting that backs up his analysis, the goal of the White House is to get Obama’s numbers up because if they continue south his clout will go south as well. Not that he has great clout right now.
The approval rating number is not just a media plaything, though it is that. It matters greatly to members of Congress -– Republicans and Democrats alike -– and to the Democrats’ shaky chances of holding onto their slim majority in the U.S. Senate.
“We had a terrible fall,” a senior administration official told me before the speech. “We had the NSA and the budget confrontations and the botched rollout of the health care website,” he said.
“What we need to do now is put one foot in front of the other and move forward, and let a stronger economy get us back on track.”
The rest of the president’s strategic reasoning has to with his assessment of his opposition. He thinks that if he plays things cautiously now –- if he avoids giving GOP adversaries a big target -– they will self-destruct.
“You can always count on them to say something stupid,” he has told his aides.
So that was the strategy in the State of the Union: Speak grandly of relatively uncontroversial things, and hope that the GOP overplays its hand.
Small ball, but runs scored.
And, indeed, so far Obama has had a piece of luck no matter how bit his obstacles. The Republicans have not display political smarts in terms of winning general elections and aggregating interest — but, rather, seem in THIS.
Some excerpts from Dickerson’s take:
“America does not stand still,” said President Obama in his State of the Union address, “and neither will I.” For the next hour the president plotted the path he would walk and the strides he would take to get around the members of Congress who had blocked his path before. But when the speech was over, the president hadn’t moved very far at all. He was still a leader entangled by Congress and the Constitution.
In the lead-up to the speech, the president and his aides talked about how he was going to use the tools of his office—the pen and the phone—to address the challenges of the day since Congress would not. But, judging from his speech, you can’t do much with a pen and phone.
And:
It’s not that these are unworthy efforts. They’re just modest compared with the president’s stated goal, of reversing decades-long changes in the workforce brought about by global competition and technological innovation. Indeed, you can’t imagine a president asking Americans to assemble to hear this list of proposals if there wasn’t a tradition saying he had to.
The president and his team are hoping that small programs will create a “foothold,” produce some good results, and then expand beyond their original design. By raising the minimum wage for employers who sign new federal contracts, for example, administration aides hope for a multiplier effect that will go beyond the limited number of employees who will benefit directly from the raise to $10.10 an hour. The idea, explains a senior administrative official, is that a big company that has to meet the minimum wage for contracting will feel pressure to raise the wage for the whole workforce, which will then compel a competitor to do the same in order to stay competitive when hiring new workers. The president’s proposal to fund school modernization would work along the same theory. Though the funding would only cover a limited number of school districts that competed for the dollars, an aide said it would create demand. The losing school districts would call their members of Congress and pressure them to raise funding so that they could update their facilities, too.
The president is pinning these policies on a lot of hope. That’s because—as becomes abundantly clear when you hear his aides explain how they arrived at some of these executive measures—he is operating under legal constraints that make it hard for a president to do much. His minimum wage effort is limited to companies entering into new contracts, because his authority to do it comes from his power to do things that are good for the “efficiency” of the government. The minimum wage increase can be defended on those grounds, say officials, because studies show it leads to retention. But it can’t be applied to all existing contracts because that would require ripping up those agreements, which is hard to defend as efficient.
And:
He returned to this emotional theme at the end of the evening when he told the story of Army Ranger Cory Remsburg. He had been injured on his 10th tour of duty and has battled back from a traumatic brain injury. The president shot him a thumbs up as he struggled to stand, assisted by his father. Remsburg returned the gesture. It led to what some observers believe was the longest sustained ovation in the history of the State of the Union. Everyone stood together to salute the hero. Now we’ll see if the only thing they can do together is stand still or if the president and his audience can get up and move.
Obama faces political constraints, institutional constraints, and constraints of the 21st century political and media culture. The presidency operates in a different context now.
Can Obama prove he can efficiently adapt to and operate within it?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.