The monarchical grandeur that typifies the president’s annual address to both chambers of Congress and the nation is a spectacle that has long vexed a shrinking pool of true republicans. The trappings of Caesarism that characterize the State of the Union address are surely worthy of reproach, but that’s far from the only cutting criticism of this display.
It’s particularly true of a president’s final year in office that the State of the Union address becomes an opportunity to reinforce ailing partisan self-conceptions. It is as true for Democrats today as it was for Republicans in 2008 that the righteousness of their cause and their party’s fitness to govern are besieged by a series of controverting facts. Recognizing that a particularly vulnerable flank is exposed, President Barack Obama is bunkering down.
According to the White House, Obama’s final State of the Union address will be a departure from form, but it’s really a return to it. The Republican Party’s presidential candidates are, with a few exceptions, more likely to sound pessimistic notes about the country’s trajectory. The president will reportedly strike an “optimistic” note in order to provide an election-year contrast with what administration advisors see as a gloomy and dour GOP message. In fact, the president is reverting to a political type that he epitomized when he ran for the presidency on “hope” – an essentially vacuous theme that sounds a more secular note than “faith,” but is generally indistinguishable in terms substance. On Tuesday, Barack Obama will ask his party’s remaining faithful to embrace and project the lost zealotry of 2008. For the Democratic Party’s partisans, the task will be a hard one.
To buttress his supporter’s waning faith in their mission, the president will appeal to popular mythology. In a sense, the president doesn’t have his work cut out for him; there is surely an eager audience of demoralized liberals desperate for a pep talk. The truth of it all is really beside the point. This is by no means a phenomenon limited to liberals. Just try convincing a Trump-backing conservative that American job growth is not illusory, that the illegal immigration population has been declining for a decade, or that Mexican nationals no longer make up the majority of illegal immigrants caught crossing the border and you’re likely to be dismissed (presuming your interlocutor is feeling polite). For the first time since 1940, more Mexicans are leaving the United States than are arriving. These are discomfiting realities for a certain segment of the electorate that wants to believe its economic displacement is the fault of reversible exogenous factors or indifferent elites. But the myths fueling a populist revival in America are nothing compared to the outright fabrications holding the liberal coalition together.
Those who attempt to communicate to a pro-Obama partisan Democrat that gun-related homicides have been on the decline since 1993 – a factor that is due, in part, to the tough-on-crime measures that liberals now deride as the policies that led to an era of “mass incarceration” – are more likely to generate angry denials than sighs of relief. The climate change canard that serves to justify an ever-expanding litany of self-imposed impairments on the American economic engine is predicated on a flimsy premise. “On an emissions rate basis (t/MWh), 2015 will be the cleanest year in over 60 years for which we have historical data,” read a Bloomberg New Energy Finance report. Global carbon dioxide emissions declined in 2015 for the first time since the 2007-2008 recession, and they did so amid consistent overall global GDP growth (with no international agreement enforcing that decline in place). The force of the president’s professorial personality that his backers believed would serve as an antidote to his predecessor’s headstrong approach to foreign affairs has not made the world a less dangerous place. From East Asia, to the Middle East, to Europe, hot conflicts have proliferated, and America’s geopolitical position is only more tenuous.
Surely, the amount of disbelief committed Obama supporters must suspend in order to maintain the kind of fawning, doe-eyed admiration the president once commanded is an increasingly tall order. In the past, the president used the State of the Union to communicate liberal principles, but he ill-advisedly did so in the form of agenda items. Progressives can look around them and see that Obama’s promises of free community college for two years, mandatory private sector paid leave, and universal pre-K education remain fantasies. Perhaps finally recognizing his limitations, the president will reportedly not be offering much in the way of grand but unrealizable promises. Instead, he will take credit for the achievements of others, and remind his dispirited liberal followers of their shared values rather than of what they’ve failed to achieve.
The president will tout the nuclear deal with Iran (unpopular), the Affordable Care Act (imploding), forthcoming passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal (uncertain), and the expansion of the rights of same-sex couples (thanks for which are due to the Supreme Court). Reverting to a form where he and his supporters are most comfortable, the president will reportedly lecture the American people about how little social progress they’ve made in the last seven years. Obama will note that Americans have declined to deal with drug abuse, gun violence, or racial tensions to his satisfaction. All the while, partisans Democrats will nod their heads secure in the knowledge that the president isn’t talking about them.
A sense of optimism in order to contrast with the message of certain Republicans is not strategically unfounded. A modest segment of the hopelessly fractured Republican electorate is attracted to a GOP message based in the idea that the nation’s best days are behind it, and all that the country can do is to divvy up what remains of the bounty that once was America. Such hopeless pessimism is unlikely to appeal to a broad audience, but optimism grounded in nothing more than faith is delusional.
If Obama hopes to contrast with Republicans and set the stage for Hillary Clinton, this president will have to walk a tightrope. It’s not clear, however, that he or his advisors recognize the narrowness of the needle they are trying to thread. The president’s speech will be, in part, a “victory lap,” according to Reuters. Dangerously for those clear-eyed Democrats who sense a difficult election year ahead, Obama will be adorning himself in laurels a bit prematurely.
