Obama’s confident State of the Union speech

February 8, 2010

by Hendrik Hertzberg

President Obama’s first State of the Union address came at the end of the most harrowing nine days of his young Administration. On January 19th, a Republican won the Massachusetts seat that had been held for nearly half a century by Edward M. Kennedy, thereby depriving the Senate Democrats of the sixtieth vote they need to pass legislation. A headline on the Web site of the Village Voice summarized the situation tartly and smartly: “SCOTT BROWN WINS MASS. RACE, GIVING GOP 41-59 MAJORITY.” In the aftermath, as the Brookings scholar Henry J. Aaron wrote in National Journal, “the White House and many Congressional Democrats seemed almost as shattered psychologically as the Haitians were physically after their catastrophic earthquake.”

The President doesn’t do shattered, but he was plainly discombobulated. When he was asked by George Stephanopoulos about the fate of health-care reform, he shilly-shallied. “The Senate certainly shouldn’t try to jam anything through until Scott Brown is seated,” he said. “People in Massachusetts spoke. He’s got to be part of that process.” He added, feebly, “I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on.” (Perhaps he had momentarily forgotten that it’s the Senate that’s supposed to advise, if not necessarily to consent. A President is supposed to lead.) A few days later, he proposed a three-year “freeze,” beginning in 2011, on discretionary, non-entitlement, non-national-security spending—about one-eighth of the federal budget. Aides quickly explained that the freeze would not be “across-the-board”—that funds would be shifted from ineffective programs to effective ones. Even so, just about everyone outside the Republican congressional caucus recognizes that, with unemployment at ten per cent, the near-term need is for more public spending—more stimulus, not less. The proposal had the look of a political gimmick and the smell of political fear.

By the time he glided into the House chamber on January 27th, Obama had recovered his balance, and then some. He looked and sounded like a trillion bucks—surplus, not deficit. He appeared to be in an unusually relaxed, even bouncy mood. He exuded confidence. The speech he delivered was no literary masterpiece (though by State of the Union standards it was downright Nabokovian), but it was a small triumph of tone and subtle theatrics. Despite the grandiosity of the setting—the curlicued proscenium, the massed dignitaries, the absurd aerobics of the endless standing ovations—the President managed to create a surprisingly intimate, almost conversational effect, as if the well of the House were a fireside and he was having a chat. With humor, reasonableness, and a touch of sarcasm, he invited the Republican grandees in the audience to play the role of straight man, so to speak, and they obliged: row upon row of pale, middle-aged white men, unmoving and unmoved, frowning or smirking at every Presidential request for coöperation.

The bulk of Obama’s speech was devoted, rightly, to job creation. But its most telling and important moment may have been the relatively brief section on health care, the problem that has consumed much of the Administration’s first year. He invited Republicans to suggest “a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen Medicare for seniors, and stop insurance company abuses”—knowing full well, of course, that they have no such approach. But he did not surrender, and he did not repeat his suggestion that reform be pared down to “elements” that “people” like. He explained why his plan would be “a vast improvement over the status quo” and issued this demand, framed as a challenge to the whole Congress but aimed squarely at his fellow-Democrats:

Don’t walk away from reform. Not now. Not when we are so close. Let us find a way to come together and finish the job for the American people. Let’s get it done. Let’s get it done.

So, so close. By the beginning of this year, both the House of Representatives and the Senate had passed comprehensive, broadly similar health-care bills. By mid-January, Democratic negotiators had nearly reached agreement on melding the two bills into one. All that remained was putting the finishing touches on the combined bill and, in both Houses, the formality of a final vote.

Post-Massachusetts, the Democratic caucus claims “only” fifty-nine senators out of a hundred—still the largest majority either party has held in thirty years and, as a percentage, precisely the same size as the Democrats’ majority in the House. But, thanks to the filibuster and to the great stone face of the monolithic Republican No, any new health-care bill that requires a standard floor vote in the Senate—indeed, any effort at health-care reform, however pared down, that could be interpreted as an accomplishment for Obama and his party—is out of the question. At this point, there is only one way to “get it done,” and only the Democrats can do it. That way is (a) for the Democrats of the House to ratify the Senate’s already-passed bill and (b) for the Democrats of the Senate to ratify whatever elements of the defunct compromise can qualify for action via a well-established procedure—“reconciliation” —under which legislative provisions that have more than “merely incidental” effects on government outlays or revenues cannot be filibustered. Reconciliation is arcane but effective, and thoroughly “bipartisan”: the Republicans used it to enact tax cuts for the comfortable, the heart of George W. Bush’s domestic program as surely as health-care reform is the heart of Barack Obama’s.

On Friday, President Obama went to Baltimore, where the House Republicans were having their annual retreat, and led them in what turned out to be, amazingly, a relatively civilized, relatively substantive discussion, mostly about health care. His passion for comity appears to be genuine. But so does his commitment to do everything he can, in the face of America’s increasingly dysfunctional governmental mechanisms and increasingly rancorous political culture, to bring about the kind of change he was elected to pursue. The discussion in Baltimore was pleasant. The day before, however, the Senate had taken a vote on extending the federal debt limit. All the Republicans voted no. That is to say, all of them voted for the United States to repudiate its obligations and go into default. That was not so pleasant.

If the President and the Democrats of Congress fail to enact health-care reform while they still have a real chance to do so, it’s hard to see how they will be able to do anything else. The damage to their ability to govern—the damage to the ability of the country to govern itself—will be severe. “I would remind you,” the President said Wednesday night, admonishing the members of his own party, “that we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve problems, not run for the hills.” The President made stirring music on Capitol Hill, but those other hills are alive with the sound of doom.