Last night Barack Obama gave his fifth State of the Union speech, and, while he did not perhaps hold out quite the same amount of hope and ambition as he has in some of his previous speeches, he did still announce a number of key policies that should ensure another exciting year in Washington.
Obama’s common thread throughout the speech was that he is not prepared to fight with Congress as he has done for the past couple years and instead will act unilaterally wherever he can and whenever he needs to. He threatened to veto any attempts to derail the Iranian nuclear talks, promised to continue to attempt gun reform, and cajoled Congress on a long list of issues including progress on education, and immigration reform. Obama demanded Congress help rather than hinder America’s economic recovery, and criticised it for the government shutdown and for trying 40 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Obama began by outlining some of the key indicators of America’s social and economic progress over the past five years: the college graduation rate is at a 30-year high; eight million new jobs have been created in the past four years; the United States has been largely weaned off foreign oil; the last five years have been the strongest ever for farm exports; the Affordable Care Act has enabled millions to have greater security; unemployment is at a five-year low; the housing market is rebounding; the manufacturing sector is adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s; the deficit has been cut in half; and for the first time in a decade the US has pipped China as the top country in the world for inward investment.
However, Obama acknowledged that structural changes caused by globalisation and technological advances over the past 40 years have resulted in huge inequality and an end to upward mobility. He regretted that even during this economic recovery too many Americans were either working just to get by or not working at all, and made clear his view that the role of government is to reverse these trends. Obama intends to achieve this through expanding vocational training, flipping the tax code to benefit companies that pull jobs back into the US from overseas, passing hundreds of building bills, creating more high-tech hubs, investing in innovation, reforming unemployment insurance, providing more loans to small businesses, and asking business to give the long-term unemployed a shot. In addition, Joe Biden is to conduct an across-the-board review of national requirements for skills and then ensure training is in place to develop these.
There were two final short but key announcements relating to the economy. Obama’s call for immigration reform (‘Let’s get immigration reform done this year. Let’s get it done. It’s time’) got a huge cheer. This has a real chance of being the Obamacare of 2014, and it is unclear if a bipartisan approach can be achieved. Then he provided a lengthy and solid commitment to tackling climate change (‘Climate change is a fact. We must act’) through moving cars from using foreign oil to US natural gas, introducing new standards for trucks, strengthening protection of air, water, land and communities, and smarter tax policies to encourage use of solar energy and discourage use of fossil fuels.
On education, Obama cited the success of the ‘Race to the Top’ initiative which has led to more people getting college degrees than ever before, and promised to launch a similar initiative for young children. He promised to redesign high schools to focus more towards career preparation and to ensure parents had more information and more financial support so they could choose the best schools for their children. For graduates, Obama wants student loan repayments tied to 10 per cent of income.
He then moved on to tackle inequality in the workplace: women only make 77 per cent of what men earn (‘and in 2014 this is an embarrassment’). He stated that women deserve equal pay for equal work and should be able to have a baby without losing their jobs, and that mothers and fathers should be able to take time off to look after sick kids. He intends to ‘do away with workplace policies that belong in a Mad Men episode’. From this, Obama moved on to the inequality for those who worked full time yet still lived in poverty, demanded that Congress take action to increase the minimum wage nationwide, and then announced an immediate increase in the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour. He also announced a review of earned income tax credits to help single workers with no kids, and directed the Treasury to help all workers get a pension through the introduction of a new scheme called MyRA which encourages lifelong saving. Obamacare got a short mention, mainly in the form of a plug for the nine million Americans who have already signed up to encourage others to do so.
The speech ended on foreign policy. Obama was clear that the US war in Afghanistan will end in December and that, after that, if the Bilateral Security Agreement is signed, a small force will remain solely to conduct counterterrorism operations and to train the Afghan national army. He noted that the threat from terrorism was still substantial and that the shift of al-Qaida and its affiliates into Yemen, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere was a troubling development. But he was clear that that the era of large-scale wars was over for now, that he would not send troops into harm’s way unless absolutely necessary, that there would be no open-ended conflicts, nor conflicts which terrorists wanted or fed extremism. He announced that the US was going to move off a permanent war footing which would mean new, substantially reduced rules of engagement for drones, a reduction in the NSA’s surveillance programmes, and the closure of Guantanamo Bay by the end of 2014. He promised to work towards a peaceful solution in Syria which would leave neither terrorists nor dictators in power. And he promised support for both Israel and Palestine while making a clear declaration that the ‘Jewish state would know that America would always be at their side.’ Obama finished his speech with a promise to improve support to veterans, including the provision of more effective mental health care.
As a footnote, there has been a lot of media discussion over the past few days about the constitutional requirement, or absence of it, for the State of the Union speech. All the constitution actually requires is for the president to provide, from time to time, information to Congress on the condition of the union. George Washington liked to give speeches, but Thomas Jefferson believed it was too much like the British monarch’s annual speech to parliament and began a long tradition of US presidents simply providing written notes to Congress. It was not until the more imperially minded Woodrow Wilson in 1913 that large-scale setpiece speeches returned, and even since then Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and others have not always given speeches for the State of the Union. However, it is now taken as a given, and although a few people have grumbled about the expense, it is unlikely that a president today would get away with just handing in a note. Some commentators have suggested that the event should be more in the format of prime minister’s questions, but this is never going to happen. Indeed, the event gives the president the opportunity to stake out his platform for the year ahead and, in Obama’s case yesterday evening, to get a standing ovation for five minutes before and five minutes after his speech whilst he hugged, kissed and shook hands with scores of Republicans and Democrats on his way to and from the Senate podium.