The 2016 State of the Union Message

The editors of the Washington Post were favorably impressed with the president’s annual State of the Union message this year:

PRESIDENT OBAMA took the biggest stage in politics Tuesday night aiming to calm a fearful nation and offer realistic ways to fix the country’s worsening politics. In his final State of the Union address, Mr. Obama acknowledged that partisanship has worsened during his presidency and accepted a share of blame — but said correctly that goodwill and leadership alone cannot repair the situation. It will take systemic reform, he said, to change the tone and substance of American governance.

while the editors of the Wall Street Journal saw it quite differently:

As he begins his final year in office, President Obama’s legacy project is already in high gear. This includes Tuesday night’s State of the Union, which is best understood as the start of a campaign to persuade Americans that the last seven years have been better than they believe. He needs to start early because this reality makeover won’t be easy.

Start with the economy, which Mr. Obama’s Boswells are attempting to reframe as a “boom.” Mr. Obama certainly inherited a deep recession, but recessions always end and deep ones usually rebound faster and higher. The test of economic policy is the pace and quality of the recovery, and this one has been the slowest since World War II.

The jobless rate has fallen to 5%, but in May 2007 under George W. Bush it was 4.4%. Today’s rate has been able to fall as low as it has in part because so many working-age Americans have left the workforce; the labor participation rate of 62.6% hasn’t been this low since 1977. Real incomes for most households have only recently begun to rise above what they were at the end of the recession in June 2009.

I found the president’s message slightly uplifting in tone but thought it would have benefited from being half as long. For those of you who pine for the long laundry lists of legislative proposals so characteristic of SOTU messages in recent years there were plenty of them. They were, however, expressed aspirationally. Rather than saying “I will present legislation” the president said “We need”.

I only have two observations to make about the message. First, more than anything and more than any of Barack Obama’s previous SOTU messages it sounded like a stump speech. I presume he’s trying to cement his position as leader of the Democratic Party. That’s something that hasn’t been mentioned much lately. There will be a contest for influence in the party, President Obama has signalled that he wants some, and President Obama’s primary opponent will be Hillary Clinton, implying that at the very best they will be frenemies.

Although he didn’t mention them by name, the SOTU contained criticisms of each of the leading Republican contenders for nomination to the presidency, couched in general terms, e.g. “those who say America’s economy is in decline”, etc.

Which brings me to my second observation. To my ear this speech was more representative of Barack Obama than any of his previous SOTUs. It was highly partisan, airily high-minded, and utterly confident in the correctness and rectitude of his judgments, to the point of branding anyone who disagreed with them as either irrational, self-serving, or otherwise biased.

To be sure there were criticisms Washington’s toxic political environment but I don’t think the president fully appreciated how much he has contributed to that environment. His proposed remedies for the political environment, as so many of his preferred remedies are, only tangentially related to the problem. Reforms of gerrymandering are the province of the states rather than the federal government and in a country in which 44.5% of the people approve of the job President Obama is doing while 50% disapprove, it doesn’t suggest a problem that will be corrected by more fairly drawn Congressional districts. There are actual, closely held, strongly felt, and even some reasonable differences of opinion. I don’t think the president really appreciates that.

There is money in politics because there is money in government. I would welcome reforms that restricted the amount an individual to contribute to a political campaign, party, or cause; prevent entities other than actual individual living people from making political contributions; and prohibit people from making contributions to candidates for whom they are ineligible to vote. Poison pills in the guise of reform are less interesting to me. I’m not under any illusions that any of those would fly (and, yes, I recognize that most of them would require constitutional amendment) or that they would actually solve the problems posed by money in politics. As I say, if you want to get money out of politics, get it out of government.

Regardless of the president’s views the country still hasn’t recovered from the last recession and unless something miraculous happens we won’t have when the next recession comes around as it unquestionably will. How much of that can be laid at the president’s door is a matter of debate. It shouldn’t be a matter of debate that he hasn’t helped much but it obviously is. Contrary to the president’s claims I’d say that to whatever extent the economy has recovered has been despite the president’s efforts rather than because of them. As evidence I’d submit that the counties that are most likely to have recovered fully from the recession are those where oil is being pumped.

Jobs? Jobs have only recovered if you believe the adjustments that the BLS has studiously applied every month. As a matter of process when the adjustment is an order of magnitude larger than what is being adjusted it’s suspect.

How is President Obama doing on foreign policy? That’s another question on which where you stand apparently depends largely on where you sit. I’m not as impressed with the president’s willingness to follow through on President Bush’s commitment to withdraw troops from Iraq, pointless build-up and then withdrawal in Afghanistan, or bombing campaign against DAESH in Syria. I’m also not particularly impressed with the Iran agreement or the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. On the former, all I can say is we’ll see. I still haven’t seen an argument in other than the most general terms that the TPP helps most Americans. I’m looking and I’d like to see one.

Are we better off today than in January 2009? Sure. Are we as well off as we should be? I don’t think so.