Washington Post (Opinion)
By Dana Milbank
January 13, 2016
President Obama’s final State of the Union address Tuesday night wasn’t a speech to Congress. It was a sermon to the nation.
It
wasn’t about policy prescriptions, really, or even about Obama’s record
in office. It was a speech about one man whose name the president never
uttered in the House
chamber — Donald Trump — and the fear the nativist billionaire is
stoking across the land in his bid for the Republican presidential
nomination. Obama’s address was an extraordinary — and welcome —
departure from the staid and ritualistic State of the Union
format, and it showed how this president has grown in office.
“America
has been through big changes before ,” Obama said near the beginning of
his speech. “Each time, there have been those who told us to fear the
future . . . promising
to restore past glory if we just got some group or idea that was
threatening America under control. And each time, we overcame those
fears.”
The
Trump theme built throughout the speech. Americans “need to reject any
politics that targets people because of race or religion,” the president
said, addressing one
of Trump’s applause lines: “This isn’t a matter of political
correctness. It’s a matter of understanding what makes us strong. The
world respects us not just for our arsenal; it respects us for our
diversity and our openness and the way we respect every faith.”
This
was presidential leadership as it should be, and as Obama was reluctant
to do early in his term: Using the power of his office to deliver a
forceful moral message.
Some may have thought it petty or unseemly that Obama was devoting a
State of the Union address to the message of a candidate for the
Republican presidential nomination. But in the current environment,
there is nothing more important than answering the dangerous
demagoguery that has arisen.
In
a pre-speech interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, Obama said that if he
could go back in time, “I think the most important thing I would say to
an earlier version of myself
would be to communicate constantly and with confidence to the American
people.” He added: “The things I’ve done well during the campaign I have
not always done well as president.”
Obama’s
grasp of this crucial point was on display for the world Tuesday night,
though the president, maddeningly cool and cerebral through much of his
tenure, learned
this important lesson far too late in his presidency. It’s tempting,
even heartbreaking, to wonder how events might have turned out
differently had Obama known then what he knows now.
Now
Obama is deep into the lame-duck stage of his presidency, and he didn’t
pretend otherwise. “I want to go easy on the traditional list of
proposals for the year ahead,”
he said at the start. He admitted that “expectations for what we’ll
achieve this year are low,” and his specific prescriptions for
legislation were relatively modest: criminal justice reform, fighting
prescription-drug abuse, tax cuts for low-income workers.
He
took some predictable shots at Republicans (“if anybody still wants to
dispute the science around climate change, have at it — you’ll be pretty
lonely”) and he boasted,
equally predictably, about his record: “We’re in the middle of the
longest streak of private-sector job creation in history. . . . Surveys
show our standing around the world is higher than when I was elected to
this office.”
But
again and again, Obama returned to his unnamed target: a xenophobic
showman who has been spreading fear and anger across the land toward
immigrants, minorities, women,
the disabled and, particularly, Muslims. “Will we respond to the
changes of our time with fear, turning inward as a nation, and turning
against each other as a people?” he asked.
Obama
wasn’t offering a 10-point plan or demanding legislation on his desk.
He was preaching. “Food stamp recipients didn’t cause the financial
crisis; recklessness on
Wall Street did,” he said. “Immigrants aren’t the reason wages haven’t
gone up enough; those decisions are made in the boardrooms.”
The
sermon was more effective because it came with some humility. He
expressed his “regrets” that partisan rancor worsened on his watch.
“There’s no doubt a president
with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the
divide.”
Obama
meandered into a discussion of money in politics before resuming the
night’s theme. “As frustration grows, there will be voices urging us to
fall back into tribes,
to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us,
or vote like we do, or share the same background,” he said. “We can’t
afford to go down that path. . . . It contradicts everything that makes
us the envy of the world.”
The president was late to find his moral voice, but it was important that he spoke.
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