State of the Union: What the president should address (revised)

President Barack Obama will deliver his second State of the Union address Tuesday trying to convince House Republicans and the American people of his progress and the importance of bipartisan policies.

As Obama reflects on his administration’s accomplishments and strides made by Congress to pass health care reform, as promised during his campaign, and the repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” that he promised in his 2010 State of the Union address, the president still faces domestic and international issues that he promised to work to solve in his campaign.

The president will address issues including the growing budget deficit, public debt, the nation’s ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, unemployment and the domestic economy, foreign trade and education.

And, since new Congressional leaders have been installed after 2010’s midterm elections, the president will call for bipartisan efforts with the Republican-controlled House to find solutions to the aforementioned issues or not only risk two years of a lame-duck stalemate on Capitol Hill, but potentially risk keeping and/or gaining new voters in the 2012 presidential election.

Although the president faces partisan opposition on most of the issues he will address, Obama must be able to present a strong plan of how to solve the nation’s budget deficit and to decrease the public debt. The Congressional Budget Office projects a $1.5 trillion budget deficit for the 2011 fiscal year. The CBO also reported the public debt is $9 trillion and projects that debt to exceed $16 trillion by 2020.

Similar to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s entrance into the presidency, Obama entered office facing the daunting task to solve the nation’s severe economic problems. Roosevelt said in his 1934 State of the Union address that the nation was beginning to recover from the Great Depression, but the nation needed “a permanent readjustment of many of our ways of thinking and therefore many of our social and economic arrangements…” Obama will try to reach out to the American people as well as his opponents in Congress to continue on a road of economic recovery with a similar attitude to Roosevelt’s.

Obama also shares similar circumstances to former President John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy entered office, he also faced recession, banks failures and unemployment problems. Kennedy searched for innovative solutions in his own time by extending unemployment benefits and by adding stimulus to the economy to create jobs, but admitted more action was needed to help American families. The unemployment rate has decreased since its highest rate of 10.6 percent in January 2010 to 9.1 percent in December 2010, but the American people and House Republicans want to know Obama’s next step to provide additional help.

House Republicans and the rest of the nation will also be waiting to hear the president’s plans to withdraw troops from Iraq and a timetable for Afghanistan. Obama did begin withdrawing U.S. troops in August 2010, and is supposed to have all U.S. troops out of Iraq by 2011. Obama has also vowed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by July 2011. The president faces pressure similar to former President Lyndon B. Johnson to withdraw troops by his timetable, but he also faces criticism from Republicans of whether troop withdrawal from Iraq was too soon.

Despite obstacles the president faces to move the country forward, Obama will surely present a message of hope and optimism. As past presidents have brought the nation together to solve its toughest economic problems, Obama will remind members of a divided Congress that that’s what it takes to accomplish the seemingly impossible, especially in the wake of the Tucson, Ariz., shooting and assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

But, can Republicans and Democrats learn to compromise? One hardly thinks so, as House Republicans have just voted to repeal the health care bill the president signed into law in 2010. One can expect the president to continue to hammer his message of the importance of bipartisanship.