THE DEBATE has turned a corner, moved on to a new common ground. After two years in which the US president’s speeches were mostly about boosting federal spending to encourage recovery, President Obama and his Republican opponents on Tuesday night were talking fiscal rectitude – and it was a matter of who would cut most.
Mr Obama, in his annual State of the Union address, proposed extending his three-year freeze on discretionary state programmes to five years to cut $400 billion from budget deficits over a decade. He also made clear that more cuts are coming, that there is no long-term solution to the challenge of the country’s 2011 $1.4 trillion deficit and $14 trillion national debt without cutting military and other spending. The Republicans want a deflationary $100 billion in cuts this year, calling the president’s plan too little, too late.
Although the president also insisted that he did not want to see tax breaks for the wealthy further extended, and spoke at length about the need to invest in education and infrastructure, overall it was not a speech that will have much endeared him to congressional Democrats. Instead, staking out a position in the middle ground – Bill Clinton would have talked of policy “triangulation” – it was a speech of a candidate with his eye on next year’s re-election campaign and the uncommitted centrist swing voters who despair of Washington-as-usual politics. It was neither a case for big government, nor laissez faire, but a bow in the direction of both fiscal conservatism and the state as enabler of business.
Once again it was laced with his standard appeals to bipartisanship, not just in politics but in the “one nation” FDR sense of national common purpose in the face of a national “Sputnik moment”. The latter, a clever reference to the country’s sense of being overtaken by countries like China, as it had by the Russian space programme in the 1960s, with a reminder that the US had, and has, if the will is there, the ability to catch up.
“We will move forward together, or not at all, for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics,” he urged. But this time it was an appeal from one who had just demonstrated in the recent vote on tax cuts and in his unifying response to the Tucson shootings, that he was actually capable of reaching out across the political divide. Obama did not suffer as badly as his party in the midterm backlash last autumn and, since then, his approval rating has surged into the 50s. A useful starting point for a re-election campaign.