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I remember recording Bill Clinton's State of the Union addresses on the VCR, and immediately rewinding them to watch again, taking notes. It wasn't that I was obsessive/compulsive, or a hopeless Clintonite. At the time in the early 90s, I was writing editorials for my newspaper, and I was deeply confused as to why 12 years of the Reagan-Bush reign of error was not yet corrected.
Alright, maybe I was a little bit of a fan-girl. I admit to weeping at Clinton's Bridge to the 21st Century rhetoric. But, mostly I was looking for clues as to when we'd see all the amazing progress promised in the '92 campaign. When would Clintonian Optimism be transform into something I could hold in my hand? I was sure that the answer would be contained in his epic SOTU speeches.
I'm a much older, and hopefully a little wiser now, so I know that there will be no magical answers in Obama's first SOTU address. It will have the requisite "laundry list" of promises, and he will hit many similar high notes from his campaign -- but, if he's smart (and we know he is), this speech won't be rewritten from campaign notes. Instead, this speech has to peel away last year's rhetoric, and explain what went wrong in 2009.
In short, he's got some explaining to do. We need to know what happened to the promise of progressive new leadership (with an emphasis on the leadership part). We voted for the passion of an all-electric Tesla two-seater (one seat for Obama, one for Biden) whirring down that bridge to the 21st Century, and instead we got a used minivan full of Clinton holdovers and Olympia Snowe -- pragmatic and affordable, but unlikely to get us across the finish line.
So Mr. President, tell us what went wrong. Why'd you appoint Summers and Geithner to do a job that called for Elizabeth Warren? What made you think you could walk away from health care reform? What made you think that we wouldn't notice you substituting back room deals with insurance and pharma for actually fighting for us like you promised you would? What makes you think you can freeze spending while we're in an economic depression that everyone is too depressed to actually call a depression?
Jesus Christ, I feel like I'm right back in the middle of my dysfunctional family with all the grandiose delusions and bait-and-switching. And Mr. President, you need to do the same work that my dysfunctional family needed to undertake (but never got around to) by acknowledging where you let us down, and spelling out how you're going to make it right. This is the only laundry list I'm interested in.
Back in the 90s I had trouble finding a coherent story to tell my readers about the direction of the Clinton Administration, and stupidly, I thought it was because I wasn't listening hard enough. The truth is, I wasn't finding a story, because all these speeches offer is "message" -- what we now call triangulation. It was time for action, but instead of action we got "reinventing government" and "don't ask don't tell" and NAFTA. These were shitty fucking policies designed to "take issues off the table" but not to solve real world problems.
So please, Mr. President, enough with the triangulation. Enough with the "spending freeze" to triangulate imaginary Massachusetts swing voters. Enough with the triangulating insurance companies and Joe Lieberman and Olympia Snowe with mandates and excise taxes. Enough with war spending while freezing education, infrastructure and jobs expenditures. Tell us what you're going to do. Tell it to us straight. And then do it.
I was under the impression that the president famous for The Audacity of Hope would be better at delivering said hope than the president from Hope, Arkansas. We know -- god, we know -- that hope is audacious. We're done with that. Right now we need our president to take us from Hope, to The Audacity of Action.
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