State of the Union speech

by philg

It turns out that we went 112 years as a republic without a president giving a State of the Union speech (history — which reveals that a remarkable 32 million people tuned into the last one!).

If you don’t like the speech, you’re a racist, at least according to the Wall Street Journal‘s “Obama Is a Man of Political Paradox”:

[Barack Hussein Obama’s] job-approval rating in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll in December stood at a mediocre 43%. … Hehas never reached … the levels of unpopularity endured by his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose job-approval rating stood at 34% at this point in his presidency. … Has Mr. Obama always confronted a ceiling in how widely he would be loved or even accepted because he is the nation’s first African-American president?

As the person who identifies as “African-American” is better-liked than the person who was identified as a “privileged white male,” a reader might perhaps be forgiven for erroneously believing that the numbers suggest the opposite. (See also the native-born American explaining to an Asian immigrant our current national mood: “we are so passionate about creating a race-blind society that we will think about and talk about race every minute of every day.”)

Given that the economy is stagnating (see “How Rich Countries Die” and “The Redistribution Recession”) and the main foreign conflicts are also mostly at stalemates (Syria/ISIS generates headlines every day but it is a slow-moving war by historical standards), I’m wondering what historians will pick out as salient about the Obama Presidency.

I’ll go first:

  • The beginning of the end of roughly a century of multinational companies being headquartered in the U.S. (see Wikipedia’s history of inversions and “How Tax Inversions Became the Hottest Trend in M&A” (WSJ, August 5, 2014))
  • The beginning of a wave of municipal bankruptcies and insolvencies (e.g., Wikipedia Chapter 9 list plus Puerto Rico). These are more a function of economic stagnation (since only Chinese- or Singapore-style per capita GDP growth and/or Nigerian-style population growth could make the promised state/local government worker pensions affordable) than specific presidential action but presidents tend to get remembered for stuff that happened when they were in office.

Readers: What do you think historians will remember about the Obama years?

11 thoughts on “State of the Union speech”

  1. They will mark this administration as the final disconnection of the American media and American public discourse from reality — the products of the mainstream media and popular culture will be regarded, 100 years from now, as just as propagandistic and delusional as we regard the Soviet-era Pravda and Izvestia and the the TV dramas produced by the totalitarian governments of the USSR and China. There are dozens of naked emperors walking around whom it is taboo to jeer at and tell the truth about, and hundreds of propaganda tropes which are characteristic of our popular entertainment much more than of our actual society, which will provide fodder for thousands of graduate theses in the history departments of future universities.

  2. Depending on the next president’s actions, I think historians will point to BHO’s presidency as a key turning point in the relationship between Congress and the President. If the next president does not repudiate the use of executive orders, special agreements with other countries, and prosecutorial discretion as mechanisms for circumventing the intended checks and balances of our system, then BHO’s presidency will probably be seen as the beginning of an imperial presidency.

  3. I would post a negative opinion of Obama, but I don’t want anyone to accuse me of racism.

    If Trump is elected, Obama will be viewed like Jimmy Carter. If H. Clinton is elected, then Obama was just the transition from bad to worse.

  7. For a fun drinking game, have a shot each time obama weirdly refers to himself as “president” or “commander in chief”. You’re sure to get blitzed. Its like even he doesn’t quite believe it, so he has to keep reminding everyone.

  8. It makes no sense to say that this question (“Has Mr. Obama always confronted a ceiling in how widely he would be loved or even accepted because he is the nation’s first African-American president?”) indicates that the WSJ thinks that the American who disapproves of Barack Obama is a racist. First, it’s a question, not a statement. Second, the writer must be aware that there are people who disapprove of all Democratic presidents.

    This has been going on for a few years now. Conservatives like to put forward the argument that racism was eliminated many years ago in America and the big problem now is false accusations of racism. Of course, there’s never any evidence put forward to support these arguments. This could be one thing that we remember about America in the Obama years.

  9. Liberal whites love the idea of voting for black leaders because it shows how unprejudiced they are without the immediate personal danger that would come from, say, living in a black neighborhood. Black voters vote overwhelmingly for black candidates (Obama’s black vote percentage was close to what Saddam Hussein used to get in Iraqi “elections”). The end result is often “empty suit” leaders – you see the same thing in the business world with guys like Don Thompson at McDonalds, Franklin Raines of Fannie Mae and Buddy Fletcher – these are guys that look great on paper and have been pushed along by the affirmative action wave but when it comes time to deliver (for anyone but themselves) they just don’t have what it takes. They have a history of “failing upward”. Obama fits neatly within this group.

  10. O will be known for foreign policy mistakes. Ask the Israelis how they’ll remember this administration. Five or six years from now these absolutely stupid moves will begin to bear fruit and we’ll be lucky if it doesn’t devolve into some sort of apocalyptic exchange. When can we move to Mars?

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