In a final State of the Union address that was mostly a defense of his record and partly a scolding of his opponents, President Obama made a rare admission of failure.
Obama may have succeeded where liberal Harry Truman had failed on expanding the federal government’s role in healthcare. He may have won two consecutive presidential elections with majorities of the popular vote, the first Democrat to do so since Franklin D. Roosevelt. And he will deservedly be remembered for being the first black man to reach the White House.
But when he acknowledged that Washington partisanship had gotten worse under his presidency and accepted at least part of the blame, he was admitting that he did not deliver on what he promised as an unknown Illinois politician speaking at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004.
The great orator who said there was no liberal or conservative America, the transcendent who was going to bridge the partisan divide actually liked to “slice and dice our country into red states and blue states” as much as any pundit.
“It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency, that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,” Obama said. Maybe Abraham Lincoln or FDR would have succeeded, but he hadn’t. He promised to keep trying.
The concession seemed tacked on to the end of one of the flattest major speeches of Obama’s tenure. It’s almost as if the skilled speechmaker who spelled out those lofty goals in Boston wasn’t around anymore either.
In fact, like much of the speech, even this was nothing new. Obama used similar lines in his State of the Union last year. “You know, just over a decade ago, I gave a speech in Boston where I said there wasn’t a liberal America, or a conservative America; a black America or a white America –- but a United States of America,” he said a year ago.
Obama again suggested it was perhaps a personal character flaw that kept him from realizing his nonpartisan goals. He said he would do better — before reminding the Republicans in the chamber that he had beaten them in two presidential elections.
Although the Boston speech that made millions of Americans fall in love with Obama was a good one, he never was the person to fulfill its promise. He was neither temperamentally nor ideologically suited to uniting the country rather than dividing it.
Those divisions were not entirely the president’s fault, of course. He inherited the 50-50 partisan split of the Bush years. He faced the most homogeneously conservative Republican Party in history.
But there was always an inherent contradiction between uniting Americans while pursuing policy objectives that deeply divide them. Moreover, Obama’s rhetorical concessions to those who disagree with him were entirely superficial.
“A better politics doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything,” Obama said Tuesday night. “This is a big country, with different regions and attitudes and interests. That’s one of our strengths, too.” He tipped his hat to the Founding Fathers for designing a system that prevented one side of hotly contested political questions from consolidating all the power.
Yet throughout the speech, Obama described those who disagreed with him as part of a long line of reactionaries who “fear the future,” “lonely” know-nothings who contest “even basic facts.”
The same president who told us Tuesday not to “think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic” said Iranian “hard-liners chanting ‘Death to America'” have been “making common cause with the Republican caucus.”
Obama clearly recognized over-the-top Republican reactions to those who disagreed with the way George W. Bush waged the war on terror. He is nevertheless blind to the same excesses when he commits them himself.
Say this much for Obama: he defies Robert Frost’s dictum that a liberal won’t take his own side in an argument (an argument with his own countrymen, at least).
You ultimately cannot behave as if your political opponents are honorable but mistaken if you think they are motivated by greed, ignorance and prejudice. A 21st century progressive will have as much difficulty cooperating with someone she sees as a climate-ravaging bigot as a Cold War conservative would have working with someone he viewed as a subversive communist sympathizer.
None of this is unique to Obama. Republican primary voters are looking for someone with the same courage of their convictions the president displayed in passing Obamacare at the expense of his own party’s congressional majorities. Republican elites are as tempted to respond to the Donald Trump phenomenon by dismissing many of their own voters as ignorant and fearful rubes rather than constituents whose concerns should be respected and addressed constructively.
But the fact that Obama isn’t the man we met in Boston all those years ago goes a long way toward explaining why there were fewer Democrats watching his last State of Union than his first and why he accomplished so much less once they were gone.
