By John Herr
It’s State of the Union season in Washington. Outside, the streets are empty, dark, and cold. Inside, the Democrats’ hearts are suffering an across-the-board freeze. A brutal nor’easter from Massachusetts has buried their hopes for change (“A Republican will win Teddy’s seat when they play haw-key in Fenway Pawk!”)
Democrats should remember that the State of the Union Address is a beginning, not an end. President Clinton proved it when, with Speaker Newt Gingrich looming behind him, he declared that the era of big government was over. Nine months later, so was the era of Bob Dole.
The SOTU is like a giant wedding rehearsal dinner. Dressed to the nines, everyone steps into their pre-arranged places, going through the ceremonial motions. (Applaud! Now look sullen!) The two feuding families are on their best behavior, with a few exceptions. (“Love, honor, and obey? You LIE!!” -- Uncle Joe Wilson).
The actual wedding isn’t until November. Voters have all year to watch ceremony give way to acrimony. Tonight, President Obama will preview the Democrats’ wedding day strategy. It consists of something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.
SOMETHING OLD. Who would have thought President George H.W. Bush -- the father -- would inspire President Obama’s economic agenda? In 1988, Bush proposed the oxymoronically named “flexible freeze.” And now, so has Obama. “It’s not an across-the-board freeze,” said Vice President Biden’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein. “We’re talking about boosting the spending that helps the middle class [and] pushing back on the special interests.” Good luck with that.
Obama’s proposal has disheartened the Left and puzzled the Right. Pollster Nate Silver called it the “White House’s Brain Freeze.” Obama opposed Sen. John McCain’s call for a spending freeze during the 2008 campaign. Now he’s winning McCain’s praise. Could the famous “O” logo be morphing into a triangle?
SOMETHING NEW. Liberals hated to see Massachusetts turn Republican. But they despised the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which turned corporations into people. “I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest,” said President Obama, speaking from a grain silo in Nebraska filled with bribed Medicaid dollars.
Of course, things cannot change into people -- except for the Jersey Shore hot tub, which had so much human DNA in it by summer’s end that it could walk across the deck. But the decision is not unprecedented. In the late 19th century, which historians call the “ZZ-Top Beard Era,” the Supreme Court ruled that corporations were protected under the Fourteenth Amendment.
In his address, President Obama will offer red meat to angry Democrats in the form of corporate governance legislation. Republicans will then remind him that if he wants to stop treating corporations like citizens, he could simply stop taxing the crap out of them.
SOMETHING BORROWED. Some Democrats claimed that Scott Brown’s win was a referendum on the economy, not on health care reform. Uh, hello? Brown didn’t promise to be the 41st vote to lower unemployment rates.
The Democrats have blown it on health care. Pundit E.J. Dionne telegraphed their arrogance before Brown’s win, urging them to quickly pass the bill so they could then “sell the contents of their reform to a skeptical public.” Yeah, pass it and THEN let us know what’s in it.
President Obama has an opportunity to help his party by borrowing the most popular features of the bill (there aren’t many) and daring Republicans to vote them down. In her debate with Brown, Martha Coakley cited three of them: closing the “donut hole” in Medicare, prohibiting denial of coverage for preexisting conditions, and allowing insurance to be sold across state lines. If Obama added medical malpractice reform to the mix, he could pick off 15-20 GOP senators. That’s the true definition of bipartisanship: choosing an issue your opponents are afraid to oppose.
SOMETHING BLUE. Democrats were cheered by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe’s recent move to the White House. Plouffe’s first piece of advice for them? “No bed-wetting.” (Hey, is that a preexisting condition?)
Blue Staters needed something to cheer about. They aren’t getting another stimulus bill -- heck, Obama’s economic team can’t even agree on how many jobs have been created or (bogus term alert) “saved” by the first one. Health care reform as they knew it is dead. And they probably aren’t getting cap and trade.
But they will be getting a promise from Obama to “fight” for change. And he might win. For all their recent successes, the GOP has not yet closed the sale. While campaigning, Scott Brown rarely spoke the word “Republican,” preferring “independent” instead. He modeled himself after JFK while avoiding comparisons to the Bush Administration. Republicans in Congress have no reason to be complacent.
In his second year as President, Ronald Reagan asked Americans to “stay the course” through the worst economy since FDR. It worked. Two years later, Americans gave him the biggest reelection victory since LBJ. Tonight, Americans will learn President Obama’s new course. If he gets behind a more popular and populist agenda, and the economy recovers quickly, he may be able to renew his vows with the voters -- and save his party from annihilation.
Herr served as speechwriter at the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Talking Back to the State of the Union
Wish you could ask the President a follow-up question after the SOTU? Well, thanks to YouTube and the White House, now you virtually can. So reports techPresident:
The White House announced on the White House blog this morning that Obama's SOTU on Wednesday night will have an added dash of citizen participation, one that harkens back to the early days of the Obama administration and its experimentation with projects like its Open for Questions forum, where thumbs-up-thumbs-down technology bubbled up questions for administration officials, and an online town hall. . .
On Wednesday night, during the 9 p.m. ET speech, a special section will be opened up on YouTube where anyone and everyone so equipped can post a follow-up question to the President Obama's State of the Union address. Google Moderator is in place to collect the public's votes on the video questions. Some of the ones that bubble to the top will be taken to the White House next week by the YouTube team. Obama will answer the questions live, streamed on YouTube at a day and time to be announced later. Calling it the "State of the Union 2.0," White House new media director Macon Phillips wrote on the White House blog that, "we are excited to announce how President Obama will also be using the web to offer the public a direct and participatory way to communicate back to him."
Obama's Secret SOTU Weapon: Scott Brown
NOTE: This inventive proposal comes to us from a Gotham Friend who is a recovering political speechwriter.
We already hear that President Obama will use his State of the Union
speech to try transitioning the conversation from health care reform,
which has dominated the debate for the last year, to the flagging
economy, which is still foremost in the minds of most Americans.
That's as it should be. We can only hope that his economic proposals
are substantive so they rise to meet the rhetoric.
But health care is still the elephant--or the petrified woolly
mammoth--in the room. Democrats want Obama to pledge to fight for
something like the legislation that already passed both houses of
Congress, bipartisanship be damned. Republicans want him to surrender
and admit he was wrong to ever daring to try to cover the uninsured in
the first place. He will clearly chart a middle course. The question
is how.
Obama should invite sudden superstar Scott Brown, who's not yet
formally seated in the Senate, to the speech. Welcome him to the job
of filling the shoes held by Sen. Edward Kennedy, who Obama revered.
Make a genuine appeal to work with Brown and other Republicans to find
common ground on health care.
And then--and this part will have to be done delicately--use Brown's
own support for the Massachusetts health care plan to make a renewed
push for reform.
Something like: "Sen.-elect Brown, you've said you believe all
Americans deserve health care coverage. I agree. You've said you
support the 2006 health care law that expanded coverage in
Massachusetts. I agree, which is why that law, imperfect as it was,
served as a major inspiration for the bill that passed the Senate.
You've also said that the Massachusetts law did too little to control
costs. Again, I agree.
How can we agree on these critical basics and still be standing on
different sides of the room, with our arms folded? That's an
abdication of responsibility. It's a failure of leadership.
I invite you and all Republicans to sit with Democrats and hammer out
a bill that insures as many of the uninsured as possible, cracks down
on insurance company abuses and dramatically cuts costs. There is
common ground--on banning preexisting condition discrimination, on
selling insurance across state lines, on tackling medical malpractice
reform, on giving individual Americans more control over their health
care choices.
I am willing to drop some of my priorities if you are willing to come
to the table and negotiate in good faith. We need reform, desperately.
I'm serious when I say I want a solution, not a campaign issue.
Everyone else in this Congress should prove they do, too."
We already hear that President Obama will use his State of the Union
speech to try transitioning the conversation from health care reform,
which has dominated the debate for the last year, to the flagging
economy, which is still foremost in the minds of most Americans.
That's as it should be. We can only hope that his economic proposals
are substantive so they rise to meet the rhetoric.
But health care is still the elephant--or the petrified woolly
mammoth--in the room. Democrats want Obama to pledge to fight for
something like the legislation that already passed both houses of
Congress, bipartisanship be damned. Republicans want him to surrender
and admit he was wrong to ever daring to try to cover the uninsured in
the first place. He will clearly chart a middle course. The question
is how.
Obama should invite sudden superstar Scott Brown, who's not yet
formally seated in the Senate, to the speech. Welcome him to the job
of filling the shoes held by Sen. Edward Kennedy, who Obama revered.
Make a genuine appeal to work with Brown and other Republicans to find
common ground on health care.
And then--and this part will have to be done delicately--use Brown's
own support for the Massachusetts health care plan to make a renewed
push for reform.
Something like: "Sen.-elect Brown, you've said you believe all
Americans deserve health care coverage. I agree. You've said you
support the 2006 health care law that expanded coverage in
Massachusetts. I agree, which is why that law, imperfect as it was,
served as a major inspiration for the bill that passed the Senate.
You've also said that the Massachusetts law did too little to control
costs. Again, I agree.
How can we agree on these critical basics and still be standing on
different sides of the room, with our arms folded? That's an
abdication of responsibility. It's a failure of leadership.
I invite you and all Republicans to sit with Democrats and hammer out
a bill that insures as many of the uninsured as possible, cracks down
on insurance company abuses and dramatically cuts costs. There is
common ground--on banning preexisting condition discrimination, on
selling insurance across state lines, on tackling medical malpractice
reform, on giving individual Americans more control over their health
care choices.
I am willing to drop some of my priorities if you are willing to come
to the table and negotiate in good faith. We need reform, desperately.
I'm serious when I say I want a solution, not a campaign issue.
Everyone else in this Congress should prove they do, too."
Obama on Obama on ABC News
President Obama provided a little taste of the tone he'll take in the SOTU Monday night in his exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News.
The headline grabbing comment: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president," Obama said.
But later in the interview, Obama signaled he would take some responsibility for the breakdown of the health care debate. And that he would dish some to Congress too.
"I think the healthcare debate as it unfolded legitimately raised concerns not just among my opponents, but also amongst reporters that we just don't know what's going on," and that some "stray cats" got in the bill, he said.
But the president insisted "I didn't make a bunch of deals… I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked."
The headline grabbing comment: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president," Obama said.
But later in the interview, Obama signaled he would take some responsibility for the breakdown of the health care debate. And that he would dish some to Congress too.
"I think the healthcare debate as it unfolded legitimately raised concerns not just among my opponents, but also amongst reporters that we just don't know what's going on," and that some "stray cats" got in the bill, he said.
But the president insisted "I didn't make a bunch of deals… I am happy to own up to the fact that I have not changed Congress and how it operates the way I would have liked."
SOTU Preview Round-up
Here are some pre-SOTU reports and comments from around the Web that we thought we were worth sharing.
- Some more detail on the spending freeze proposal that Obama will tout in the SOTU, courtesy of Politico.
- David Paul Kuhn at Real Clear Politics offers some historical perspective on the (minor) political import of the SOTU on presidential fortunes.
- Neil Steinberg of the Chicago Sun Times suggests that Obama will have to make like Houdini to get out of the political box that the the health care debate has put him in today.
Bill Clinton's Revenge
By William McGurn
(Cross-posted from the Wall Street Journal)
He's baaaaack.
When the president enters the House chamber tomorrow night to deliver his maiden State of the Union address, members of Congress, the press, and the public will see Barack Obama at the podium. But they will have Bill Clinton on their minds.
Specifically they will be thinking of 1995, when a humbled Mr. Clinton addressed a newly Republican Congress after his own health-care proposals went down in flames. Though President Obama's party still holds the majority in both houses, it is a scared majority that has been unnerved by the unpopularity of the president's signature policy issue (health care) and terrified by the loss to Republicans of what they all, with David Gergen, regarded as the "Kennedy seat." So whatever Mr. Obama says tomorrow night, his words will inevitably be compared with the speech Mr. Clinton used to rescue his own presidency.
You see it in the return of words such as "pivot" and "triangulate," all evocative of a Clinton-like shift, in the pre-State of the Union commentary. Even those urging Mr. Obama to come out swinging rather than compromise are forced into a Clinton comparison. Thus the headline over Democratic strategist Robert Shrum's story in the magazine The Week last Friday: "Is this Clinton's Third Term?"
Even for the comeback kid, this is quite a turnaround. Almost two years ago to the day, Bill Clinton was a pariah in polite Democratic society—blamed for his wife's loss in the South Carolina primary, where he had compared Mr. Obama to Jesse Jackson. That followed a similar storm in the New Hampshire primary, where he also created a stir by characterizing Mr. Obama's antiwar credentials as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."
A few days after the South Carolina loss, Sen. Edward Kennedy and his niece Caroline administered what appeared to be the coup de grace by endorsing Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton must have found it galling to watch Mr. Obama claim the Kennedy inheritance he believed was rightfully his. But Mr. Kennedy didn't stop there, sniping at the Clintons with such lines as "with Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion."
Others piled on. It wasn't just that people preferred Mr. Obama to Hillary. The sense was that the Democrats were finally free to purge their party of the Clintons forever. Maureen Dowd captured the mood when she suggested Democrats take their cue from a Dr. Seuss rhyme: "The time has come. The time is now. Just go. I don't care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Will you please go now!"
Yet for all his undeniable weaknesses, Mr. Clinton does seem to understand something that eludes Mr. Obama: In a center-right nation, a liberal doesn't want to get too far ahead of the voters. At times (and HillaryCare was one) Mr. Clinton got himself too far out in front—but when he had, he'd generally been careful to respond by scurrying back to the center and appropriating his opponents' most appealing messages.
That's exactly what he did in 1995, deploying humor and humility with equal effect in his State of the Union. "I know we bit off more than we can chew," he told Congress.
The following year he declared "the era of big government is over." He also reached out to Republicans on policy, embracing everything from welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act.
In the process, he learned one thing: In a nation where roughly 20% describe themselves as liberal, 40% as conservative, and 40% as moderate, there's not a high price for shutting out the left. As for history, Mr. Clinton went on to become the only Democrat since FDR to win and serve two full terms as president.
There's no sign that Mr. Obama buys any of this. His team argues, apparently oblivious to the inherent condescension, that no intelligent American could possibly oppose his health-care agenda on substance.
It's all just a big misunderstanding, says the White House. We just need to explain it better—like recasting a second stimulus as a "jobs bill," selling health-care reform as "deficit reduction," and throwing in a lot of speech references to the "middle class."
For his part, Mr. Obama is clear. He says he'd rather be a one-termer than give up on his agenda. But this State of the Union, with the president's approval ratings sinking, Democrats have to be asking themselves: Do Mr. Obama's chances of getting his agenda through really go up if the congressmen and senators listening to his words come to the conclusion he's a short-timer?
McGurn, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, was formerly chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush
(Cross-posted from the Wall Street Journal)
He's baaaaack.
When the president enters the House chamber tomorrow night to deliver his maiden State of the Union address, members of Congress, the press, and the public will see Barack Obama at the podium. But they will have Bill Clinton on their minds.
Specifically they will be thinking of 1995, when a humbled Mr. Clinton addressed a newly Republican Congress after his own health-care proposals went down in flames. Though President Obama's party still holds the majority in both houses, it is a scared majority that has been unnerved by the unpopularity of the president's signature policy issue (health care) and terrified by the loss to Republicans of what they all, with David Gergen, regarded as the "Kennedy seat." So whatever Mr. Obama says tomorrow night, his words will inevitably be compared with the speech Mr. Clinton used to rescue his own presidency.
You see it in the return of words such as "pivot" and "triangulate," all evocative of a Clinton-like shift, in the pre-State of the Union commentary. Even those urging Mr. Obama to come out swinging rather than compromise are forced into a Clinton comparison. Thus the headline over Democratic strategist Robert Shrum's story in the magazine The Week last Friday: "Is this Clinton's Third Term?"
Even for the comeback kid, this is quite a turnaround. Almost two years ago to the day, Bill Clinton was a pariah in polite Democratic society—blamed for his wife's loss in the South Carolina primary, where he had compared Mr. Obama to Jesse Jackson. That followed a similar storm in the New Hampshire primary, where he also created a stir by characterizing Mr. Obama's antiwar credentials as "the biggest fairy tale I've ever seen."
A few days after the South Carolina loss, Sen. Edward Kennedy and his niece Caroline administered what appeared to be the coup de grace by endorsing Mr. Obama. Mr. Clinton must have found it galling to watch Mr. Obama claim the Kennedy inheritance he believed was rightfully his. But Mr. Kennedy didn't stop there, sniping at the Clintons with such lines as "with Barack Obama, we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion."
Others piled on. It wasn't just that people preferred Mr. Obama to Hillary. The sense was that the Democrats were finally free to purge their party of the Clintons forever. Maureen Dowd captured the mood when she suggested Democrats take their cue from a Dr. Seuss rhyme: "The time has come. The time is now. Just go. I don't care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. Will you please go now!"
Yet for all his undeniable weaknesses, Mr. Clinton does seem to understand something that eludes Mr. Obama: In a center-right nation, a liberal doesn't want to get too far ahead of the voters. At times (and HillaryCare was one) Mr. Clinton got himself too far out in front—but when he had, he'd generally been careful to respond by scurrying back to the center and appropriating his opponents' most appealing messages.
That's exactly what he did in 1995, deploying humor and humility with equal effect in his State of the Union. "I know we bit off more than we can chew," he told Congress.
The following year he declared "the era of big government is over." He also reached out to Republicans on policy, embracing everything from welfare reform to the Defense of Marriage Act.
In the process, he learned one thing: In a nation where roughly 20% describe themselves as liberal, 40% as conservative, and 40% as moderate, there's not a high price for shutting out the left. As for history, Mr. Clinton went on to become the only Democrat since FDR to win and serve two full terms as president.
There's no sign that Mr. Obama buys any of this. His team argues, apparently oblivious to the inherent condescension, that no intelligent American could possibly oppose his health-care agenda on substance.
It's all just a big misunderstanding, says the White House. We just need to explain it better—like recasting a second stimulus as a "jobs bill," selling health-care reform as "deficit reduction," and throwing in a lot of speech references to the "middle class."
For his part, Mr. Obama is clear. He says he'd rather be a one-termer than give up on his agenda. But this State of the Union, with the president's approval ratings sinking, Democrats have to be asking themselves: Do Mr. Obama's chances of getting his agenda through really go up if the congressmen and senators listening to his words come to the conclusion he's a short-timer?
McGurn, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, was formerly chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush
Can Obama Improve the State of the State of the Union?
By David Murray
Every year the State of the Union is the same story, even if we aren’t in a mid-term election year in a crap economy with a president’s popularity teetering atop a teetering piece of signature legislation.
Ahead of the SOTU show, everybody says the president’s got to say something—stay the course, ignore the doubters, things will get better if you just follow me—and instead, he says everything, and we remember none of it at all.
I once heard James Carville say everyone accuses communication advisors like him of filling empty vessels with their words. “Naw,” he said, “I empty full vessels”—persuading his clients to say one meaningful, powerful thing, and to say it well.
The State of the Union, traditionally, is full-to-overflowing, as if this is the president’s only chance to communicate on every front. (It’s not!)
I realize that’s the genre. But it’s not a commandment.
And when the stakes are this high, one hopes a president who claimed to offer change we could believe in could bring himself to tweak the SOTU, and focus on “one crucial matter I need to discuss with you tonight,” letting us know the rest of the stuff is in the PowerPoint deck, available at whitehouse.gov.
Anything short of a New Kind of State of the Union, and I predict all the pundits, including yours truly, will be expressing disappointment for the umpteenth consecutive year going back to the days when it was called the Annual Message.
(That’s Message, singular.)
David Murray is editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, and editor of the widely read free weekly ezine, Executive Communication Report.
Every year the State of the Union is the same story, even if we aren’t in a mid-term election year in a crap economy with a president’s popularity teetering atop a teetering piece of signature legislation.
Ahead of the SOTU show, everybody says the president’s got to say something—stay the course, ignore the doubters, things will get better if you just follow me—and instead, he says everything, and we remember none of it at all.
I once heard James Carville say everyone accuses communication advisors like him of filling empty vessels with their words. “Naw,” he said, “I empty full vessels”—persuading his clients to say one meaningful, powerful thing, and to say it well.
The State of the Union, traditionally, is full-to-overflowing, as if this is the president’s only chance to communicate on every front. (It’s not!)
I realize that’s the genre. But it’s not a commandment.
And when the stakes are this high, one hopes a president who claimed to offer change we could believe in could bring himself to tweak the SOTU, and focus on “one crucial matter I need to discuss with you tonight,” letting us know the rest of the stuff is in the PowerPoint deck, available at whitehouse.gov.
Anything short of a New Kind of State of the Union, and I predict all the pundits, including yours truly, will be expressing disappointment for the umpteenth consecutive year going back to the days when it was called the Annual Message.
(That’s Message, singular.)
David Murray is editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, and editor of the widely read free weekly ezine, Executive Communication Report.
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