WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Barack Obama called on Americans to “turn the page” in a State of the Union address Tuesday night that laid out a sprawling, post-recession domestic agenda aimed at leveling the economic playing field — and revitalizing his presidency in its final two years.
“America, for all that we’ve endured; for all the grit and hard work required to come back; for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this: The shadow of crisis has passed, and the state of the union is strong,” Obama said.
It was the first time in his presidency that Obama had used the familiar phrase so directly, without qualification or condition, in a State of the Union speech.
Confident throughout his address, Obama also declared “a breakthrough year for America,” a dramatic shift for a president who has spent his time in office either slogging through grim economic news or pleading for patience for better times ahead. But White House aides argued that the president was ready to move the economic debate past fights over austerity into what he labeled “middle-class economics.”
Obama outlined a wide-ranging platform to fill in that definition. He proposed free community college, expanded child care tax credits, a new tax benefit for two-income families, a push for paid leave, and a proposed tax increase on the wealthy to pay for programs the White House says will help a battered middle class participate in the economic turnaround.
He vowed to improve job training programs, advocated for “a free and open Internet” and issued a blunt challenge to lawmakers who oppose raising the minimum wage.
“If you truly believe you could work full time and support a family on less than $15,000 a year, go try it,” he said, with a confident chuckle. “If not, vote to give millions of the hardest-working people in America a raise.”
Obama’s remarks were at odds with his political opponents’ aims to turn the page from the Obama era to a new one of Republican dominance in Congress.
Delivering the party’s rebuttal, freshman Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa described Americans as still rattled from the aftershocks of the Great Recession. She squarely blamed the president’s policies, including his landmark health care law.
“We see our neighbors agonize over stagnant wages and lost jobs. We see the hurt caused by canceled health care plans and higher monthly insurance bills,” she said in the Republican response. “Americans have been hurting, but when we demanded solutions, too often Washington responded with the same stale mindset that led to failed policies like Obamacare. It’s a mindset that gave us political talking points, not serious solutions.”
Obama looked out on a House chamber filled with the first entirely GOP-controlled Congress in a decade and more Republican opponents than at any point in his time in office. Still, the president saved his gestures of compromise and bipartisan outreach for well into his speech, and he did not offer any specific olive branch to the new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
Obama made an appeal for “a better politics” and blasted “gotcha moments,” but he seemed to do little else to ease the tensions. When he went on to note he has “no more campaigns to run,” Republicans cheered. Obama returned his own dig.
“I know ‘cause I won both of them,” he ad-libbed.
Obama’s speech was not aimed at political centrism. Buoyed by rising public approval and an improving economy, aides have said the president is eager to use the moment to show the public — and Washington — he won’t go quietly.
Obama vowed to veto any measures that would undo his sweeping immigration executive actions or his health care law. His tax proposals — which would raise $320 billion in new revenue over a decade — were more likely to frame the upcoming debate than start negotiations on tax reform.
After a year of being whipsawed by foreign crises, Obama defended his policies overseas for those who have pushed for more aggressive responses by casting his choices as “a smarter kind of American leadership.” The phrase echoed a catchphrase the White House has used before to encapsulate his foreign policy: “Don’t do stupid stuff.”
“When we make rash decisions, reacting to the headlines instead of using our heads; when the first response to a challenge is to send in our military — then we risk getting drawn into unnecessary conflicts, and neglect the broader strategy we need for a safer, more prosperous world,” Obama said in his address. “That’s what our enemies want us to do.”
He defended nuclear negotiations with Iran and restated his promise to veto proposed legislation that threatens additional sanctions. He touted his plans to open up U.S. policy toward Cuba, urging Congress to end the half-century-old trade embargo as Alan Gross, the imprisoned American aid worker freed after five years in a Cuban prison, looked on from the balcony.
Some Republicans answered the White House’s symbolism with their own, inviting Cuban democracy activists as guest.
Obama cast the U.S.-led coalition battling extremists in Iraq and Syria as strong and urged patience. He vowed he would work with Congress to rewrite the law for use of force that has authorized the air campaign already underway.
Senior administration officials described updating that law, the Authorization of Use of Military Force, as the president’s top legislative priority.
Another will likely be passing key trade deal, an effort that will require Obama to persuade his own party to join the effort. To that end, he made a rare appeal aimed at the Democratic base.
“Look, I’m the first one to admit that past trade deals haven’t always lived up to the hype, and that’s why we’ve gone after countries that break the rules at our expense. But 95 percent of the world’s customers live outside our borders, and we can’t close ourselves off from those opportunities,” he said.
Obama offered measured remarks on two of the controversies that consumed part of his year. First, he made a plea for criminal justice reform in the wake of the debate over race and policing that followed the riots in Ferguson, Mo.
People may have different “takes” on the events, “but surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed,” he said. “Surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift.”
Similarly, on the debate over the balance between free speech and anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim messages that erupted in the wake of the terrorist attacks this month on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, Obama appeal only for understanding.
“As Americans, we respect human dignity, even when we’re threatened,” he said.
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