In A State

I caught most of the SOTU last night. If the exceptionalist rah-rah is obligatory, it's still not very palatable, especially in its most militaristic form. And in its overlooking who benefits from the economy and who doesn't.

Today Digby joined Sam Seder to discuss the speech. While acknowledging Obama's second term has been the more vigorous, thanks to his willingness to use executive orders, Sam and Digby hit all the speech's objectionable points. Which also serves to list of some of the most misguided ideas of the last seven years.

Obama had again expressed his disappointment at not having brought people together, as promised. Digby remarks that his pre-Washington life experience seems to have made him believe he truly could have united the country, despite this being "a really fatuous idea"—

There are ideologies at work: people have them, they believe them, it's not just some ... sense that they need a leader to come along and stitch together this great American patchwork quilt, and we'll all live happily ever after—that just isn't what's going on ... We're in a battle, and it's a big one ..."

And Digby found the "the howler of the night": Obama's saying to Republicans, "we all want people to vote"...

About Nikki Haley's GOP response (and its supposed rebuke of Trump), Sam notes the media refusal to recognize that—

...the story is about the Republican party, not Donald Trump—it's the people who support Donald Trump, not that Donald Trump is some type of magical wizard who's able to conjure up something that wasn't there before.

With conventional wisdom assuming a part of the GOP knows it will have to deal with issues like immigration, Digby observes—

there is a fringe: now called, the Republican Establishment.

It's a striking point, and it's reflected in the way Cruz can play to every other faction and ignore the Establishment, knowing the latter will have to come around to accepting him.

Even so, Obama says, "It's one of the few regrets of my presidency that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide..."

Harold Myerson responds with a little history―

Neither Lincoln nor FDR was able to bridge the gaps that their own policies created. Their triumphs, rather, were to prevail over their opponents. Simply by winning the 1860 election, months before he took the presidential oath, Lincoln prompted South Carolina and six other Southern states to secede. His first inaugural address concluded with a plea to the South not to commence a civil war. He appealed to the "better angels of our nature." The South responded by bombarding Fort Sumter. So much for Lincoln's ability to bring the nation together through his powers of persuasion. He was surely the greatest and most profound orator ever to serve as president, but while Frederick Douglass acclaimed his second inaugural address as "a sacred effort," John Wilkes Booth heard the speech and resolved to kill Lincoln then and there.

From 1933 through 1937, Roosevelt was able to persuade Congress to enact the most far-reaching social legislation the nation had ever known. He did not accomplish this by convincing mainstream Republicans to back these measures. (There were liberal Republicans in those days who did support them, but they were the exception.) Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, Glass Steagall, and a host of other structural reforms were enacted, and the Works Progress Administration funded, because an electorate that had moved left in response to the Great Depression sent to Washington the most lopsidedly Democratic congresses in the nation's history. Republicans reviled Roosevelt, calling him "that man" rather than even mentioning his name. His political appeal crossed the partisan aisle only when he donned the mantle of wartime president—and then, only sometimes.

At least FDR wasn't assassinated—though there was that little matter of the attempted coup (which I wrote about here). In any case, Roosevelt was willing to make "We Have Only Just Begun to Fight" the theme of his 1936 re-election campaign speech. Roosevelt didn't speak about playing nicely with vicious opponents, and he couldn't have put it more clearly—

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.