President Barack Obama will deliver his second State of the Union address Tuesday before a divided Congress ― a Democratic majority in the Senate and a Republican majority in the House.
Cue sound effects. DUN DUN DUUUNNNN!
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, it is important for the president to address other serious issues including the growing budget deficit, 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, it will be important for the president to try to work 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 partisanship opposition on most, if not all, of the issues he will address, Obama must be able to present a clear, strong plan of how to begin solving the nation’s budget deficit, whether that includes raising taxes for a short period of time and/or cutting additional spending wherever he can, and unemployment. The Congressional Budget Office reported $9 trillion debt the public owns and projected that debt to exceed $16 trillion by 2020.
Not so unlike former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Obama entered office during a recession so severe that no recession has been reported worse since the Great Depression. And like Roosevelt, who said in his 1934 State of the Union address while proposing his own legislation to move the U.S. out of depression that “we are definitely in the process of recovery, lines have been rightly drawn between those to whom this recovery means a return to old methods ― and the number of these people is small ― and those for whom recovery means a reform of many old methods, a permanent readjustment of many of our ways of thinking and therefore of many of our social and economic arrangements…” Obama will have to try to reach out to the American people as well as his opponents in Congress to continue on a road of economic recovery.
Also not so unlike another president of the past, Obama 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 stimulants to the economy to create additional nonagricultural jobs. He stated in his 1962 State of the Union address “we began the year in the valley of recession ― we completed it on the high road of recovery and growth. …We are gratified ― but we are not satisfied. Too many unemployed are still looking for the blessings of prosperity…” Though Kennedy worked to decrease unemployment and bring the U.S. out of recession, he admitted that the progression still wasn’t good enough ― more was needed to help American families. Even though the unemployment rate has decreased since its highest rate of 10.6 percent in January 2010 to 9.1 percent in December 2010, the American people, and especially House Republicans, will be waiting to hear the president’s next step in solving this problem.
House Republicans and the rest of the nation will also be waiting to hear the president’s plans for totally withdrawing 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. According to news sources, Obama has also vowed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan by July 2011 ― a war that has raged on for almost a decade. Similar to controversy that rained on Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, Obama faces pressure to withdraw troops by his timetable, but he also faces criticism from Republicans of whether troop withdrawal from Iraq was too soon. The president’s timetable for Afghanistan has also been questioned as to whether or not it is too soon for U.S. troop withdrawal
In the midst of the problems both the president and the nation faces, 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, but it doesn’t mean that the president will stop hammering his message of the importance of bipartisanship.
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