WITH TUESDAY night’s state of the union address still resounding, US president Barack Obama yesterday set off on a three-day tour of five swing states he needs to win to be re-elected in November.
Obama will not reach such a large audience again before his nomination by the Democratic convention in September, and the 65-minute speech constituted the real kick-off of his campaign.
Fairness, the president said, has become “the defining issue of our time”. It was imperative that America restore “the basic promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement”.
Obama said: “We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does his fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
The president then pivoted for more than half an hour to a laundry list of small-bore measures to improve the economy. Perhaps wary of giving the Republicans ammunition, he was less adamant and spoke in less detail than he did in Kansas last month about the need to reverse the growing inequality between the wealthiest Americans and all others.
The strongest measure he suggested – to impose a minimum income tax for millionaires – was buried more than halfway through his speech, but nonetheless made news headlines.
Hours earlier, the Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney – whom the White House still believes is the man most likely to win the nomination – revealed that he paid only 13.9 per cent on his 2010 income of $21.6 million. Although Obama did not name Romney, he provided a perfect foil to the president’s proposal.
The White House had filled the first lady’s box in the Capitol with Americans who personified elements of Obama’s speech. One of them was Debbie Bosanek, the secretary of the billionaire Warren Buffett.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times last August, Buffett wrote that he paid a lower tax rate – 17.4 per cent – than any of the 20 people in his office. That inspired Obama to propose the “Buffett rule”.
“If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 per cent in taxes,” Obama said. “Washington should stop subsidising millionaires.”
The remark that “if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 per cent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up,” was, like much of the speech, intended to counteract Republican propaganda, which implies Obama wants to raise everyone’s taxes.
“You can call this class warfare all you want,” Obama said. “But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”
No one listening to Obama’s address had any illusion that the Buffett rule – or any of his other proposals – could pass in the Republican-held House of Representatives this year. The president was merely telling the public what he would do if Congress would let him.
“I bet most Americans are thinking the same thing right now,” Obama said. “Nothing will get done this year, or next year, or maybe even the year after that, because Washington is broken.”
The cheery vision of bipartisan co-operation that marked the beginning of Obama’s term has all but vanished, yet the theme of the need to work together was threaded through the address.
“I will work with anyone in this chamber to build on this momentum [of the improving economy],” he said. “But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.”
Obama opened and closed his address by contrasting squabbling politicians to what he portrayed as the noble military. “For the first time in nine years, there are no Americans in Iraq. For the first time in two decades, Osama bin Laden is not a threat to this country,” he said to a standing ovation.
“At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, [the military] exceed all expectations,” Obama continued. “They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example.”
Republican leaders sat stoney-faced through the speech and showed no sign of having heard Obama’s plea for conciliation in their subsequent reactions. House speaker John Boehner, who sat behind the president during the address, sent out emails accusing Obama of misleading Americans with “a political gimmick”.
The governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, whom the Republicans chose to deliver their official rebuttal, said: “No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favour with some Americans by castigating others.”
For one brief moment, the joint session of Congress united in applause and emotion, on the arrival of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot in the brain in a shooting rampage in Arizona one year ago. Giffords resigned yesterday to concentrate on her recovery. Obama gave her a long, rocking bear hug, and there were tears in the eyes of many.