Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
As President Barack Obama prepares to deliver another State of the Union address, questions are being raised about whether or not the promises he makes tonight will end up like so many of his past pledges – unfulfilled.
A variety of media sources are reporting that the President has some high hurdles to overcome in his speech tonight, which is expected to be both partisan and mostly political. Far too many of the promises he made in the last two SOTU addresses fell by the wayside, either because they were too partisan and could not hope to pass both Houses of Congress or because other priorities forced them onto the back burner.
” . . . (T)he aspirations he’s laid out have often turned out to be ephemeral, unable to secure the needed congressional consent or requiring follow-through that’s not been forthcoming,” reports the Associated Press (AP).
The president is expected to lay out the usual laundry list of initiatives, but as his presidency winds to a close, tonight’s speech will probably be more of a campaign speech as he tries to convince a souring public to re-elect him in November.
“State of the Union addresses are kind of like the foam rubber rocks they used on Star Trek — they look solid but aren’t,” said Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. “Presidents will talk about solving some policy problem, and then the bold language of the State of the Union address disappears into the messy reality of governing.”
For instance, last year’s speech took place in the wake of the tragic shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, and Obama used the occasion to call for national unity. However, this unity never came to pass as Washington politics eventually dissolved into the usual partisan bickering and Obama began a presidential campaign based on waging class warfare.
Other initiatives from the same speech that failed to materialize was the elimination of subsidies to oil companies, replacing No Child Left Behind with a better education law, making the tuition tax credit permanent, reforming the tax system and rewriting immigration laws.
“The list of what he succeeded in accomplishing is considerably shorter,” writes the Associated Press. “Securing congressional approval of a South Korea free trade deal; signing legislation to undo a burdensome tax reporting requirement in his health care law; and establishing a website to show taxpayers where their tax dollars go.”
His grandiose “Sputnik moment” from last year’s speech sputtered into oblivion. A pledge to meet with Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle once a month ended up in the same place as his heralded promise of transparency – nowhere. A promise to reorganize the federal government was unveiled just this month and his calls for renewed commitments to clean energy technology resulted in the scandalous Solyndra debacle. The high speed rail project he promised would transform U.S. transportation the way interstate highways did 50 years ago has fallen victim to spiraling costs and diminishing public support.
“Clearly as time goes on and a presidency matures you get less and less of it and the State of the Union becomes an aspiration for what you want to do as opposed to a road map for what you can accomplish,” said Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer to the AP. As voters’ enthusiasm fades and opposition deepens, Zelizer said, “You lose some of your power and you get closer to the next election and no one wants to work with you.”
Even the left-leaning media is admitting that Obama hasn’t made good on most of his SOTU promises, and the few he did keep are grossly unpopular, such as the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act that a healthy majority of Americans want repealed.
In the same speech, he also promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay and to impose caps on carbon pollution – two more pledges that went unfulfilled.
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