For progressives, Tuesday’s State of the Union isn’t so much about what President Barack Obama says, but how forcefully and expansively he says it.
They’re looking less for a specific wish list — though they have one of those, too — than for Obama to deliver a robust response to what he has repeatedly called “the defining issue of our time.”
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In a tone-setting speech in December, Obama embraced an increase in the minimum wage and spoke of his commitment to broad principles. Now he’ll have to balance how much further to take that to energize his base against the damage he could do to red-state Democrats — particularly in Senate races where the party’s on defense — by seeming to swing too far.
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But the politician whose fate progressives say is really in the balance is Obama himself. Though the president’s promise has them more excited — and even hopeful — than they’ve been in years, they warn that he’ll either follow through with a State of the Union that really starts bringing their response to income inequality to the mainstream or squander his last chance to deliver on the promise of his 2008 election.
“This is the last State of the Union before people can see the sunset,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League. “You can frame this. You can talk about things in a lot of different ways, but fundamentally, you’re talking about the notion of direction.”
Progressives say Obama will have to directly address — though likely not by name — recent speeches by Republicans like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin that have described inequality as a behavioral problem.
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And they’re looking for some attention to the generally agreed-upon progressive wish list: an executive order raising the minimum wage for government contractors, a vocal defense of his job creation record along with a proposal for a new jobs bill, a fresh case for fresh infrastructure investment and a new call for immigration reform — including executive actions that cut back detentions and deportations while waiting for Congress to act.
“Of the State of the Unions, this one’s huge — and it’s huge because these issues are lingering, because of our economy, because of the gridlock and deadlock in Congress,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva, co-chairman of the Progressive Caucus.
White House aides have been reluctant to preview what will or won’t be in the speech, and would not comment on meeting progressives’ expectations. But there is a clear sense of urgency mounting in the building, derived in part from a president who seems increasingly attuned to the ticking clock.
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Progressives can’t do a whole lot if Obama doesn’t deliver, other than be disappointed and show up in smaller numbers to the polls in November — and warn the president that he would be on track to fail, by his own standards: “I can tell you that I will measure myself at the end of my presidency in large part by whether I began the process of rebuilding the middle class and the ladders into the middle class, and reversing the trend toward economic bifurcation in this society,” he told author David Remnick, in a New Yorker profile published this week.
For progressives, living up to that will require more than tactics and bullet points.
Obama has some leeway, they argue, with a budget agreement that removes the threat of a shutdown or constant negotiations. But nonetheless, they’re desperate to see him accept the political reality of the past three years, exemplified by the stalled efforts to renew unemployment insurance benefits in the past few weeks: Republicans resist the Obama agenda, and any proposed new spending is met with the requirement to make cuts elsewhere.
The president needs to use the speech to explain why that trade-off no longer makes sense, said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
“I hope that the president will make it very clear that when the middle class is struggling and we have more people today living in poverty than any time in American history, that we are not going to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid,” Sanders said.
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