State of the Union -- My Elephant Sat on Sputnik

Like many of you I sat in front of my TV with a bowl of JD and watched the President give his annual lecture to the freshman class – err I mean give his Annual State of the Union Address. This year I missed getting the chance to gaze into the eyes of Nancy Pelosi for an hour or so and was disappointed that Speaker Boehner did not cry one time. I know this post comes a little late but I wanted to have a little time to steal the best ideas from the 8 zillion people who already weighed in on the speech.

One response is that I really should be happy about the speech. I have been moaning about the negative tone of partisan politics and so I should really be elated by the fact that both the left and the right decried the speech a horrible disappointment. If both extremes were unhappy with the President, then it should follow that he took a big dive into the middle thus moving away from the extremes. But unfortunately I don’t see it that way. I think they are both right to be unhappy. And the reason is that the President may have proved to both sides and all of us just how thin his knowledge and experience really are.

Writing in the Financial Times on January 27, Robert Reich spoke for the left when he (Why our Sputnik Moment will fall short) said the following, “What he (Obama) should have done is talk about the central structural flaw in the US economy, the dwindling share of its gains going to the vast middle class, and the almost unprecedented concentration of income and wealth at the top.”  I won’t quote anyone from the right but it was pretty clear they were very disappointed to see him stress increased government spending as the way to improve America’s wellbeing in the future. He acknowledged a national debt challenge but didn’t seem very worried about it.

As one dedicated to the arcane science of simple cause and effect, I share the negative assessments of his speech largely because the president talked about lots of policy but hardly ever told us his view of the exact nature of our most pressing problems – or the causes of them.  While his smile and rhetoric are rare and his solutions dazzle the mind, his absolute lack of any sincere attempt to link his latest policy proposals to any realistic explanations of problems suggests to me that he doesn’t really understand them. Where is David Letterman when we need him – with a top 10 list of America’s worst economic problems?

To elaborate the point – while I don’t agree with Reich about the relative current importance of income distribution issues – one wonders after the speech what Obama thinks about that. Will emulating the Sputnik fervor with respect to education, green energy, and infrastructure alter the relative positions of the rich, the middle class or the poor? If so, can he explain how and why?  So much for people interested in policies to improve income distribution. Don’t we have a housing/financial crisis? Did we solve it already? Is it not REALLY important that our policy somehow connect to this problem? Shouldn’t he have spent a little time on this one thing that seems to have set off the worst recession since the day when bread cost 7 cents a loaf? Of course, if he thinks the housing/financial crisis is over or lacking interest, then maybe he might have discussed the fact that three years worth of federal government deficits are expected to exceed $4 trillion dollars between 2009 and 2011. Or maybe he thinks that’s honky dory and doesn’t need our attention in the coming year.

Reich has his stuff and I have mine – but the real truth here is that our President seems to have jumped on a satellite with the Dallas Cheerleaders and Dr. Phil – with the result a breathtaking lecture that continued his theme of hope and change without any real discussion of cause and effect.

Worse yet, hidden in a smoke screen of working together was an apparent switch to a new horse called competitiveness – without any real attention to what it means and how you get it. You don’t have to be a Republican to wonder what is the connection between some diffuse and rosy mention of improving education and what it really takes for the US economy to be more competitive. Democrat or Republican, you don’t really want to experiment with the people’s money right now betting on a very new horse.  If you were critical in any way of the stimulus story, then imagine what you are thinking about an abrupt turnaround of policy in the name of government policy induced competitiveness.

One more point. One theory is that Obama is weak when it comes to cause and effect. Another one is that he is VERY strong at politics. Notice that by switching horses and by agreeing to discuss details of tax restructuring, education, healthcare, and competitiveness policy—he will turn the spotlight away from him and towards all those folks who will debate themselves hoarse in the time leading up to the next election. Obama comes off looking like the great compromiser and both democrats and republicans will look like warring tribes of the bush.

The cat is out of the bag or you might say the elephant is in the gift shop – Sputnik is a great diversion but I think we would be a lot better off if we just erased our memories of his speech and started over – with some simple discussion of cause and effect and what our most pressing problems are today.