State of the Union and the Next Generation Progressive
Print
Email
You have endless choice this morning when it comes to the next day analysis of President Obama's speech last night. Depending on which pundit you pick, the State of the Union address was bold and forceful, rhetorical, jumbled, on point, missed the mark, polite, defiant and a little bit right, left and center...
We can't highlight them all, so here is Michael Lind, the policy director of New America's Economic Growth Program, for Huffington Post. Lind doesn't cut Obama much slack except here and there on energy, financial reform, and student loans and his support for community colleges.
I wish I could be more positive. But the takeaway from this speech is that Obama and the Democrats saved the country from depression by passing "25 different tax cuts" and that we will rebuild our manufacturing by helping mom-and-pop stores use high-speed rail to export the hand-crafted batteries, windmill blades, and solar panels they make in their garage workshops to the numerous and wealthy consumers in Panama and Columbia, who, it must be presumed, will not be buying even cheaper batteries, windmill blades, and solar panels from certain Asian countries that suppress wages, outlaw labor unions and pollute with abandon, or from certain European countries that happen to be massively subsidizing exactly the same kind of solar panels, windmill blades, and batteries. Oh, and our policy of cornering the windmill-battery-solar panel market in Central America will succeed only if all American kids know trigonometry by the age of six, as all Indian kids already do, and are adept at calculus by the age of nine, like every child in China.
Future generations of American progressives, if there are any, will shake their heads at this mixture of right-wing market fundamentalism and hippie-ish green romanticism and try to figure out where the Democrats went wrong. Let's hope that those future generations are not investigating the origins of a second era of Republican conservative hegemony.
Did you listen to the State of the Union last night? We want to hear what you thought.
(Photo taken by Pete Souza)
