At the end of January, President Barack Obama unleashed upon
the nation his fifth State of the Union address, an exercise in redundancy,
some would say, because almost everyone in the Union who has been paying
attention to current affairs knows that the state of the Union is a mess.
There are some hopeful signs. The romance between Mr. Obama
and the Union’s left of center media appears to be suffering some strain.
Consider the following paragraph, which appeared in the Hartford
Courant’s print edition the day after the address but was replaced the next day
with a different story on the paper’s site:
“In his fifth prime-time State
of the Union address, Obama made clear that instead of trying to fix the
mess in Washington, he was now promising
to find ways around it.”
If you are a U.S. Congressman, Democrat or Republican, this
is just the kind of sentence you do not want to see an election year – and
Courant editors made certain that visitors to the paper’s site would not see it
-- particularly when it appears as a page one story in a major left of center
paper such as the Washington Post.
Consider the setting of the State of the Union address. Past
presidents have used the occasion to report to Congress on the state of the
union, hence the name of the address. Mr. Obama, not surprisingly, is here
using the occasion to unfurl an election campaign banner. His critics would say
the president has from his crib days forward been in an uninterrupted campaign
mode. However, in the upcoming campaigns, Mr. Obama will be playing the part of
a bystander running a campaign against – take a deep breath – Congress. The
U.S. Congress is perhaps not an appropriate venue for attacks on the Congress.
But Mr. Obama perhaps did not wish to dwell on his own record in office. Like
most lame duck presidents, he is now running for history, and the occasion
presented an opportunity to him to extend his progressive legacy to another
generation.
Mr. Obama has been favorably compared to almost every
president save Franklin Pierce, but the president he most closely resembles,
both in tone and message, is Woodrow Wilson, an unabashed progressive and
internationalist. Obamacare, riven by architectural flaws, is Mr. Obama’s
League of Nations, professor Woodrow Quixote’s windmill giant. After Obamacare, there can be no second act
for Mr. Obama. During his first four years in office, Mr. Obama was incapable
of presenting a budget that might make it through the usual legislative sausage
machine, and so he presented no passable budget – even to a congress his party
controlled. Mr. Obama's crisis presidency is energized by crises of its own making.
In his second lame duck term, Mr. Obama promises further
skirmishing, fairly certain that the usual left of center media will point to
Republicans as the obdurate opposition. This time around, he will continue to
produce legislation through executive fiat. The U.S. Constitution assigns to
the body Mr. Obama holds in such high contempt, the U.S. Congress, the power to
make laws; the president, in the constitutional scheme of things, is charged
with executing laws voted upon by the Congress. During his first term, Mr.
Obama fell into the nasty habit of changing laws sent to him by Congress and
executing the laws he amended without first submitting the presidential
revision to Congress for legislative approval.
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, who gushed over the State of
the Union speech, does not seem to mind the possibly unconstitutional slight.
Mr. Blumenthal pronounced Mr. Obama’s speech “riveting.” Someone should send the senator a rivet; perhaps he does not know what a rivet
is or does.
Mr. Blumenthal followed his rivet remark with yet another emotional
spasm, unusual for the sometime dour, comically serious former Connecticut
Attorney General: “The President’s riveting and resounding address was focused
exactly where our priorities need to be – empowering the middle class by
creating jobs and boosting the economy, as well as the unprecedented needs of
veterans. A minimum wage increase is vital because every American deserves a
living wage.”
In Connecticut, the second richest state in the Union, a
“living wage” of $10.10 will buy you a ticket to the mortuary. As a matter of
fact – Mr. Blumenthal likes to deal in facts; at least that was the case, so he
said, when he was Attorney General – a $10.10 an hour salary in Connecticut is
rather uncommon. Mr. Blumenthal is best known by his few critics in Connecticut
as having claimed or strongly suggested, falsely and several times during his
campaign for the Senate, that he was a Vietnam War veteran.
Mr. Obama’s boost in the minimum wage will lift very few
boats in Connecticut, and it likely will cost a some workers their jobs. If Mr.
Obama wanted to raise a tide that would lift all the boats and at the same time
“level the playing field,” a rhetorical expression often used by Mr.
Blumenthal, he easily could have lowered business taxes and reduced costly and
cumbersome regulations during his first term. The obdurate Republican House
would not have opposed such a sensible and effective economic stimulus. Come to
think of it, this was precisely the remedy for a stagnant economy presented by
President Jack Kennedy in his often quoted speech to the New York Economic Club
way back in 1963, a few months before Mr. Kennedy was assassinated. A bipartisan Congress proceeded to reduce
marginal tax rates and encumbering regulations, and the economic tide did
indeed lift all the boats, as a result of which additional monies flooded both
state and national treasuries. Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Great Society” program, which
followed the in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, was funded with Mr. Kennedy’s
tax revenue.
But never mind that the ship of state is headed for an
iceberg or that the state of the union is in disrepair. The states of Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Obama are sounder than the state of the state or the state of the nation, and that's what matters.
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