POLITICO: …[President] Obama did deploy plenty of rhetoric about the distant future. But he did just as much traditional boasting about work already done, from cutting unemployment in half to cutting the deficit by three fourths, from resuscitating the auto industry to expanding health insurance, from stopping Ebola to killing Osama bin Laden. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a traditional progress report, but when the White House posted it on Medium, it included charts detailing “The Progress We’ve Made on the Economy,” “The Progress We’ve Made on Climate Change,” and “The Progress U.S. Leadership Has Made in the World.” Maybe it wasn’t exactly a traditional State of the Union, but it did conclude with the familiar words: “The state of the union is strong.”
As a yes-we-can candidate running on post-partisan dreams, Obama was often dismissed as a talented speechifier who had never gotten anything done. But as a grind-it-out president in a hyper-partisan age, he’s turned out to be more effective at doing than talking. He has not brought Americans together with his bully pulpit–his aides say he particularly dislikes the annual State of the Union charade–and he has failed to end the pettiness and bitterness of Washington. But he has produced dramatic and often underappreciated change in the policy arena, and last night, he smuggled plenty of backward-looking triumphalism into his ostensibly forward-looking speech.
He’s still clearly reluctant to dance too exuberantly in the end zone at a time when few Americans share his rosy view of the nation’s progress, when even his would-be Democratic successors are leery of excessive celebration. But if his main plot was about harnessing the spirit of America to win the future, his spike-the-football subplot was about how that’s already happening. “It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations,” Obama said. “It’s how we reformed our health care system and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.” … (more)
