Two lefty bloggers saw President Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night as a milestone in Obama’s long-term, ongoing effort to roll back Reaganism -- or, as one of the bloggers put it, to steer “the ‘supertanker’ that is the U.S. government in a leftward direction, making sure its trajectory now bends away from a reflexive, Reaganite distrust and antipathy for the welfare state.”
Elias Isquith of Salon asserted that in January 2009, “after eight years of George W. Bush,” America “was in such rotten shape that Obama had little time to do more than stave off the next crisis,” but that by this week, favorable economic developments had given him “an opportunity to boast of changing the ‘trajectory’ of the country like few presidents before him and none since Ronald Reagan.” Central to that hoped-for change, Isquith added, is Obama’s “affirmative case for government.”
From Isquith’s piece, headlined “Bye-Bye, Reagan Conservatism: Why Obama’s Speech Was More Significant Than It Seems” (emphasis added):
Obama spent the vast majority of his penultimate State of the Union making the kind of argument you usually expect to hear from a departing president: cataloging his victories and needling his critics. And to a significant degree…that was because the country he inherited after eight years of George W. Bush was in such rotten shape that Obama had little time to do more than stave off the next crisis.
But as much as the president’s address was characterized by a growing economy finally giving him a chance to say what he’d like to do with the fruits of his labor, the synoptic nature of the speech was also a consequence of Obama’s well-known preference for thinking about the “long game.” For the first time in more than six years, he had an opportunity to boast of changing the “trajectory” of the country like few presidents before him and none since Ronald Reagan. Crucially, he could do so while pointing to benefits that were tangible in the here and now, rather than being likely to occur in the indeterminate future, as has often been the case. He seized the opportunity, and made his case for what it would mean to be a citizen in the United States that Barack Obama helped make.
It sounds, I know, remarkably ambitious — even hubristic. Still, it’s a goal Obama’s never been particularly hesitant to share, despite the fact that his moderate demeanor and often self-consciously centrist policies don’t fit our expectations for how a guy trying to “fundamentally transform” a superpower acts…
Obama’s hyper-ambitious “long game” can feel, paradoxically, like small-ball. But if we keep in mind that the Constitution was, in many ways, designed so as to weaken democracy as much as possible without ultimately losing the people’s consent, the president’s gradualism is easier understood. What’s more, it reveals passages in Tuesday’s State of the Union…which subtly push…back not only [against] Reagan-style conservatism but also against Clinton-style neoliberalism — which, in other words, make an affirmative case for government — as more significant than they initially seem…
In the end, pushing the “supertanker” that is the U.S. government in a leftward direction, making sure its trajectory now bends away from a reflexive, Reaganite distrust and antipathy for the welfare state, has always been President Obama’s No. 1 goal…On Tuesday night, for one of the very first times, he was able to tell the American people that following a new North Star had taken them to friendlier waters.
Meanwhile, Brian Beutler of the New Republic, in a piece headlined “Obama Is Finally Having the Reagan Moment He Dreamed About For Years,” argued that the SOTU address was one “component of a project…to establish the parameters of the economic debate for years and years, the way Ronald Reagan’s presidency lent supply-side tax policy and deregulation a presumption of efficacy that shaped not just Republican, but Democratic policy for two decades.”
Beutler added that “Republicans spent the entirety of Obama’s first term (and most of his second) in the grip of a prophesy [sic] that every one of Obama’s significant achievements would contribute to an American cataclysm. That these predictions haven’t materialized now makes it easier for Obama to champion his own legacy at conservatism's expense.”
