Don’t deny it. What you really want to read about is Marco Rubio’s instantly infamous water lunge, but first let’s start with the serious stuff: President Obama’s carefully plotted campaign speech, thinly disguised as a State of the Union address.
For a man who is said to chafe at some of the absurd rituals of his office, Obama seems to have come around to this one, at least. From the moment he walked into the packed House chamber, he looked like he was actually enjoying himself—hardly surprising, given his recent string of political victories and his rising approval ratings. There were handshakes for practically everybody in his path, a warm exchange with Chief Justice Roberts, who last year single-handedly saved his health-care reform, and a hug for Mark Kirk, a Republican senator from Illinois, who is recovering from a stroke. After an air kiss from his wife, Michelle, who was up in the gallery, and a quick grip-and-grin with Vice President Biden and Speaker Boehner, he was off: quoting J.F.K. on the need for bipartisan action; pledging his best efforts to restore a “rising, thriving middle class”; accusing the Republicans of seeking to balance the budget on the backs of the old and the sick; and unveiling a laundry list of government initiatives that must have kept the White House’s branding crew busy.
Really, it was quite a list. There was the “Fix-it-First” plan to repair crumbling infrastructure; the “Partnership to Rebuild America”; the “College Scorecard”; the “Energy Security Trust”; and a host of other things that apparently defied the best efforts of the naming team, including a proposal to establish a network of manufacturing hubs. On top of these projects, the President called for comprehensive immigration reform, raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9, and starting a federal-state program “to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America.”
Almost all of these things are good ideas. (Having seen it tried in Britain, I have some reservations about the public-private-sector financing model that underpins the “Partnership to Rebuild America.”) Still, it wasn’t immediately clear how carrying out all of them would be consistent with the President’s statement that “nothing I’m proposing tonight should increase our deficit by a single dime.” But maybe we can let that pass. With Washington still hopelessly divided, this was an occasion for expressing aspirations rather than laying down concrete plans, and for baiting the Republicans. “The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem,” Obama said. “They don’t expect those of us in this chamber to agree on every issue. But they do expect us to put the nation’s interests before party.”
From the White House’s perspective, the primary point of the speech wasn’t to persuade Republicans in Congress to embrace voting reform, or to force fast-food restaurants to raise their wages by almost twenty-five per cent, although it would surely welcome either unlikely development. As long as the Republicans control the House, there isn’t a snowball-in-Hell’s chance of most of the President’s initiatives being enacted. Boehner spent most of the speech fixed in his seat, looking like he had a toothache—either that or he was desperate for a cigarette. He didn’t even get up to applaud Desiline Victor, a doughty one-hundred-and-two-year-old Miami woman, who spent six hours in line waiting to vote last November because of problems at her polling station, and who was sitting in the gallery.
In short, Obama’s main goal was to further the combative political strategy that saw him reëlected to the White House, and that then forced the G.O.P. to retreat on the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling. Long gone is the era when he treated Republicans as reasonable men and women with whom he could do business. Nowadays, he is in permanent campaign mode. With the ongoing dispute over taxes and spending still far from decided, he is intent on rallying his supporters whilst depicting his opponents as crazed ideologues and craven defenders of the privileges enjoyed by the ultra-rich.
Thus, we were treated to the sight of a President, who reluctantly signed onto a fiscal-cliff deal that failed to eliminate the scandalous carried-interest deduction enjoyed by hedge-fund and private-equity managers, trotting out his old campaign line about changing the tax code to ensure billionaires don’t pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. One of the few times he departed from his prepared script was when he asked, “Why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special-interest tax breaks? How is that fair?” To ram the point home, he added, “Why is it that deficit reduction is a big emergency, justifying making cuts in Social Security benefits, but not closing some loopholes? How does that promote growth?”
When Marco Rubio, the boy-wonder Republican senator from Florida, got up to deliver the G.O.P. response, it quickly became clear he had nothing very new or original to say. Grinning like an actor in a toothpaste commercial, he delivered an almost entirely predictable speech, claiming the President wanted to “tax more, borrow more, and spend more,” and describing him as a clueless enemy of the free-enterprise system. Donning the mantel of the late Jack Kemp, Rubio suggested that a combination of tax cuts and regulatory reform—i.e. more deregulation of energy and other industries—could get the economy growing by four per cent a year, a rate it hasn’t managed to sustain for decades, apart from a couple of years in the late nineteen-nineties.
To be fair to Rubio, with a combination of eye contact and vigorous hand gestures, he was doing a decent job with the tough task of delivering a lengthy speech to a camera in an empty room. But then, for some reason—and it must have seemed like an urgent one to him—he decided to reach for a small plastic bottle on a nearby table and take a swig, thereby almost ducking out of the camera shot and sending the Twitterverse into hysterics. “Uh-oh. Water gulp—really bad TV optics,” Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia, tweeted. “SNL, Colbert, Stewart…here they come.” After that diversion, Rubio appeared to realize his error, and he looked a bit shaken. For some reason, the camera closed in on his face, which didn’t improve things. As the Democratic pundit Paul Begala cruelly noted on Twitter, the Senator was sporting a sheen of sweat that inspired memories of Richard Nixon.
In the grand scheme of things, Rubio’s moment of desperate thirst might not matter very much, although it certainly didn’t help his 2016 Presidential aspirations. (Bobby Jindal 2009 redux?) Like most of the big political nights over the past year, this one belonged to Obama, who ended his remarks with an emotional appeal for the elected representatives in the room to bring his gun-control proposals to a vote. After introducing the parents of Hadiya Pendleton, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl who was recently killed in a Chicago park, the innocent victim of a gang shooting, he repeated three times, and to loud applause, “They deserve a vote.” And he went on: “Gabby Giffords deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote. The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence—they deserve a simple vote. They deserve a simple vote.”
It was a stirring end to what some of the pundits described as Obama’s best State of the Union address yet. (In truth, the bar wasn’t very high.) “I thought it was an audacious speech,” David Gergen said on CNN. Not for many years, the veteran commentator noted, had he seen a President embrace old-fashioned liberalism and activist government in such a forthright manner. “Bill Clinton stood at that lectern and said the era of big government is over,” Gergen reminded us. “Tonight, it seemed to be making a comeback.”
Photograph: Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images.
