By Charles Pierce, Esquire
29 January 14
1) When all the cheering for Cory Remsburg, the
grievously wounded Army Ranger, died down didn't you stop for a moment
and think, "Damn, 10 deployments." What the hell have we been doing
there?
2) The whole chamber couldn't rise as one and cheer
the notion that people shouldn't have to raise their families in
poverty? That got him about half the hall, from the way it looked on TV.
I know that a good portion of his political opposition believes that
poor people are marked by god and their own insufficiencies of character
to be poor, but at least couldn't they all have pretended that at least
the notion of poverty was something we universally deplore?
Once again, he was the only obvious president in the
room, much good may that do him. He did not rile up the base. He was not
combative. He did not dwell on issues that his base wanted to hear. (If
you had "Keystone XL," or "NSA," or "TPP" in your State of the Union
drinking game, you probably wound up as the designated driver.) But he
was firm on one thing. He is not going to be a lame duck as long as he
can still walk. There were a lot of sentences that began with some
variation of, "If Congress won't act..." And he can still throw a sneaky
right hand over the top.
Now, I do not expect to convince my Republican friends
on the merits of this law. But I know that the American people are not
interested in refighting old battles. So again, if you have specific
plans to cut costs, cover more people, increase choice, tell America
what you'd do differently. Let's see if the numbers add up. But let's
not have another 40- something votes to repeal a law that's already
helping millions of Americans like Amanda.
This promise to use the powers of his office is what
likely is going to raise all those hackles that were going to be raised
in any case unless he got up there and abdicated in favor of Mitt Romney
but, really, he couched these assertions in the mildest fashion, making
of himself just a guy who was just trying to do the job to which he had
been elected. He would like to have done it a different way but, darned
it, the regular way just didn't work, and now it's time to take out the
tire iron and give the old machine a good bash. There wasn't a scintilla
of anger in his voice all night.
There was just a rueful tone to it, as
though he had finally gotten the joke that history had played on him
with the election in 2010 of the opera boufee that is our current House
of Representatives.
The speech was Clintonian in three basic ways. First,
and most obviously, it was long, almost 7000 words, and he delivered it
very, very carefully. (John Boehner's face seemed to darken as the
evening went along, like the side of a mountain that faces the sunset.)
Secondly, it made a conscious, and largely successful, effort to argue
policy positions from anecdote. The opening passage was a list of his
administration's accomplishments folded into what appeared to be parable
form:
Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, my
fellow Americans, today in America, a teacher spent extra time with a
student who needed it and did her part to lift America's graduation rate
to its highest levels in more than three decades. An entrepreneur
flipped on the lights in her tech startup and did her part to add to the
more than 8 million new jobs our businesses have created over the past
four years. (Applause.)An entrepreneur flipped on the lights in her tech
startup and did her part to add to the more than 8 million new jobs our
businesses have created over the past four years. An autoworker
fine-tuned some of the best, most fuel-efficient cars in the world and
did his part to help America wean itself off foreign oil. A farmer
prepared for the spring after the strongest five-year stretch of farm
exports in our history.A rural doctor gave a young child the first
prescription to treat asthma that his mother could afford. (Applause.) A
man took the bus home from the graveyard shift, bone-tired but dreaming
big dreams for his son. And in tight-knit communities all across
America, fathers and mothers will tuck in their kids, put an arm around
their spouse, remember fallen comrades and give thanks for being home
from a war that after twelve long years is finally coming to an end.
And all of them still live in a place called Hope.
And finally, and most important, the speech was
undeniably partisan while remaining conciliatory. This is a wire-walk of
which Bill Clinton was the master, and this president has learned to
stay up there pretty deftly himself. For every dark caution about what
he'd do if they didn't, he pitched to Congress the idea that they all
ought to get together and do something because the country was getting
pretty pissed at all of them. He even pitched Boehner, whose balls are
buried in a Mason jar somewhere in a spot only Eric Cantor knows, and
who, I suspect, would like to leave a legacy behind as Speaker that
consists of something more than keeping the likes of Louie Gohmert --
and Twitter's new star bullgoose Texas loony, Randy Weber -- in
four-point restraints, a lovely little lifeline while doing so.
The point is, there are millions of Americans outside
Washington who are tired of stale political arguments and are moving
this country forward. They believe, and I believe, that here in America,
our success should depend not on accident of birth but the strength of
our work ethic and the scope of our dreams. That's what drew our
forebears here. It's how the daughter of a factory worker is CEO of
America's largest automaker. How the son of a barkeeper is speaker of
the House. How the son of a single mom can be president of the greatest
nation on Earth.
He was extraordinarily strong in spots, particularly
on voting rights, where he plainly had a lot to say, and said it all,
and on the process of getting the country off what he rather daringly
described as the "permanent war footing" it had been on since 2001. Some
of the economic ideas, particularly the expansion and strengthening of
the Earned Income Tax Credit, were sound and worthy of immediate action,
which they won't get. I'm still a little vague on the MyRA thing, which
smacked a little bit of the gimmick, and which, in any case, is just
another stop-gap by which the country can forget that, once, everybody
had a guaranteed pension, before the unions broke down and the sharpers
on Wall Street looted what was left.
But, if this speech burned no barns, it didn't sound
anything like a last chance, either. The president seemed to have a pen
and one hand, and that well-worn olive branch still in the other. He is
what he always has been, the coolest head in the room. You can never say
he isn't that.
ere are two takeaways from 
