State of the Union Notes

Photo: Alex Wong/2015 Getty Images

I haven’t had much time for reading up on it this week, but here are just a few things I came across about Tuesday night’s State of the Union.

…from the latter piece from Brian Beutler at TNR:

…

The Atlantic’s David Frum, once a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, posits that Obama’s real aim in proposing policies he knows Republicans will reject is to limit Hillary Clinton’s options, lest she be tempted to regress toward a mushier centrism. …

This would be a more compelling argument if the White House and the burgeoning Clinton campaign weren’t closely aligned—if Obama were promoting ideas that offended Hillary Clinton’s brain trust, or if his consigliere, John Podesta, wasn’t leaving the White House to staff up and guide the Clinton campaign. Frum assumes that Clinton, the 2016 candidate, will see the country’s political challenges no differently than when she ran for president before the economic crisis in 2008, or when she represented New York state as a senator for two terms starting in 2001.

Most of the evidence points in a different direction. Yet if Obama and Clinton are more closely aligned than people assume, he wouldn’t need to use his State of the Union to confine her, but rather to begin the process of priming the public for her campaign. And that’s not strictly a matter of testing voter appetite for various policy ideas, but of building a case before the public that Democrats have had better economic ideas all along and that a Democratic approach to national policy deserves to reap the benefits of incumbency.

Tuesday’s State of the Union was thus a single component of a project that’s much more meaningful than budget brinksmanship or the 2016 campaign—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.

Seven years into Obama’s presidency, the U.S. economy is finally growing rapidly enough to boost his popularity and to sell the country on the idea that Obama’s peculiar brand of ostentatious incrementalism—building out and improving existing institutions, directing resources through them to the middle class—has worked, and should serve as a beacon not just for liberals, but for conservatives aspiring to recapture the presidency.

“At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious; that we would crush jobs and explode deficits,” Obama said. “Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years.”

…