PRESIDENT BARACK Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden went on the road yesterday, just hours after Mr Obama urged the US to “win the future” by investing in innovation, education and infrastructure to make itself more competitive.
Mr Obama’s journey to Wisconsin, like Mr Biden’s trip to Indiana, was part of a “White House to Main Street Tour” intended to put meat on the bones of Mr Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday night.
Mr Obama pursued his “Sputnik moment” analogy by visiting three factories specialising in solar and wind energy and aluminium manufacturing in Manitowoc, the industrial town where, as the president recalled, “almost 50 years ago, that chunk of metal came crashing down to Earth”.
The Russian satellite, launched in 1957, “set the space race in motion”, Mr Obama reminded workers. “We’re going to need to up our game. We’re going to need to go all in. We’re going to need to get serious about winning the future . . . It’s here in Manitowoc that the race for the 21st century will be won.”
As the president continued the pep talk rhetoric from his speech the previous evening, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)announced that the federal budget deficit would reach nearly $1.5 trillion this year, an all-time record.
Senator Kent Conrad, the chairman of the Senate budget committee, said the CBO report “should be another wake-up call to the nation . . . The fiscal challenge confronting us is enormous.”
Reducing the deficit was one of five main themes in Mr Obama’s speech on Tuesday night. The only concrete deficit-cutting measure which the president announced was a five-year freeze on “discretionary” spending, which accounts for 12 per cent of the budget and does not include medicare, social security or defence.
He had already announced a three-year freeze a year ago. The five-year freeze would save $400 billion over 10 years, Mr Obama said. But, he acknowledged: “We have to stop pretending that cutting this kind of spending alone will be enough. It won’t. The $400 billion in cuts offered by Mr Obama are only a fraction of the $2.5 trillion demanded by a group which represents most House Republicans.
“Unfortunately, even as he talked about the need for fiscal discipline, President Obama called for more ‘stimulus’ spending without making a commitment to the cuts and reforms the American people are demanding,” John Boehner, the speaker of the house, said in a statement after Mr Obama’s speech.
The White House stopped using the term “five pillars” to describe Mr Obama’s speech after right-wing radio stations began mocking the term as “the five pillars of Islam”. Mr Obama nonetheless hewed to the themes that had been announced earlier: innovation, education, infrastructure, cutting deficit spending and streamlining the government.
The president argued that the US cannot compete globally without government investment. “Cutting the deficit by gutting our investments in innovation and education is like lightening an overloaded airplane by removing its engine,” he said.
The president set goals: that 85 per cent of US energy should come from “clean” sources by 2035; that 80 per cent of Americans would have access to high-speed rail within 25 years and that 98 per cent would have high-speed wireless within five years.
“Americans are sceptical of both political parties, and that scepticism is justified – especially when it comes to spending. So hold us accountable,” Paul Ryan, the chairman of the house budget committee, said in the official Republican rebuttal to Mr Obama’s address.
The Republican representative Michele Bachmann, who founded the Tea Party Caucus, angered moderate Republicans by delivering her own televised response to Mr Obama.
“For two years, President Obama made promises, just like the ones we heard him make this evening,” Ms Bachmann said. “Yet we still have high unemployment, devalued housing prices and the cost of gasoline is sky-rocketing.”