‘THE STATE OF OUR UNION IS GETTING STRONGER’: On Tuesday, President Obama delivered his third official State of the Union address. Clocking in at over an hour, the speech offered a plethora of populist bromides and demands to Congress to give him some legislation to sign. Obama also reminded Congress that, with or without their help, he would continue to move on strengthening the economy, reforming education, and encouraging clean energy, among other executive branch initiatives. One of the biggest goals of the speech was obviously to push back against the mountains of lies and distortions about his presidency that have been pushed by the GOP candidates during primary season. So Obama touted his record on job creation, his renewed diplomacy and foreign policy, his (rebuffed) efforts to cut the deficit and reform the tax code, his low rate of regulation approval in comparison to Bush, his approval of new trade deals, his expansion of offshore oil drilling, his successful passage of Wall Street reform, and his repeated attempts to work toward bipartisan compromise. The White House once again put together an annotated video of the speech, placing charts and graphs touching on the content of the speech in a side-by-side view next to the speech. It’s pretty cool.
Overall, though, I didn’t find the speech that exciting or inspiring. Granted, it was refreshing to hear him spend so much time discussing income inequality and the basic unfairness of our tax system. But even those sections were not nearly as powerful as his Osawatomie speech, which a fraction of the American people heard. I was particularly disturbed by his touting of an “all of the above” energy strategy -- a line straight out of Sarah Palin’s mouth -- that gives equal weight to oil, natural gas, coal, and clean energy development. And nowhere in his rather lengthy discussion of energy did he mention climate change. I also don’t understand his refusal to name the specific policies he is defending, with the primary example being the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill. He reminded the audience, to applause, that under his administration “we’ve put in place new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like this never happens again.” That’s clearly what Dodd-Frank is intended to do, and it’s popular! But it doesn’t help if he doesn’t say, “By the way, that is called the Dodd-Frank bill, the same one you keep hearing the GOP candidates label a ‘job-killer’ that they pledge to repeal.” In every debate, both Gingrich and Romney spout lie after lie about “Dodd-Frank.” My guess is that most people have no idea what that bill even is. So if Obama’s going to to go the trouble of defending it, he should name it, so that people can compare what he’s saying about it to what the GOP is saying about it.
UNMITIGATED CRAZY IN THE GOP RACE: When I left you two weeks ago, Romney’s path to the nomination seemed obstacle-free (except, of course, for the giant obstacle of his total unlikeability). But last weekend’s South Carolina primary has, once again, thrown the race wide open, with Newt defeating Romney by a resounding 12 points, coming from as much as a 14-point deficit in the polls just a week before the vote. Newt’s ascent was fueled mostly by his two South Carolina debate performances. In one, he attacked CNN for having the audacity to ask him about his ex-wife’s claim that he demanded an “open marriage” so that he could continue his six-year-long affair with Callista. In the other, he spewed forth what may be the most racist 4 minutes of speech I’ve seen on TV ever. (And then he promptly made an ad out of it.) Newt also benefited from the fact that Romney still had not figured out a way to talk about his work at Bain successfully, and still did not have an answer to the question to when he would release his tax returns. After hemming and hawing about it for a week, Romney released two years’ worth of tax returns on Tuesday morning, hours before Obama’s State of the Union Speech. The president could hardly have hoped for a better gift: Romney’s returns showed that he paid an effective tax rate of 14 percent on over $20 million of income each year -- years, by the way, during which Romney claimed to be “unemployed.” This set up perfectly Obama’s pitch for the “Buffet Rule,” which would close the loopholes that allow millionaires to pay a lower effective tax rate than teachers, cops, and the rest of the middle class. The fact that Romney’s enormous income came entirely from dividends means that he also paid almost nothing to Social Security and Medicare through the payroll tax. (Similarly, even during the time he was at Bain Capital, he likely paid only a tiny percentage of his total income to FICA taxes, since the bulk of his income came through carried interest. More about carried interest here.)
GOOD POINT ON NEWT’S RISE: I would make this into a “Must-Read,” but it’s good enough to quote at length. Here’s Jon Chait, writing that the Republican Establishment, which is now in full panic over Gingrich’s potentially unstoppable rise, has no one to blame but itself: “The Republican Establishment, having spent three years stoking its voters into a fit of wild rage against President Obama, now finds itself in a panic over the possibility that those voters might be wild and enraged enough to go ahead and select Newt Gingrich as their nominee. There really is a lot of humor in the situation. The proposition Gingrich is offering GOP voters is just the natural extension of what they have come to believe. Obama is an ultra-radical, as well as a lightweight, who can’t speak without a TelePrompTer, so simply forcing him into a series of lengthy debates will expose his incompetence and extremism. To convince Republican voters to settle for Mitt Romney, the Establishment now has to tell them that defeating Obama will be … tough.” Chait writes a follow-up post arguing that Gingrich can credit his current good-fortunes primarily to Citizens United -- a development liberals decried and conservatives, including the Republican Establishment, welcomed with open arms.
GOOD NEWS -- Getting Closer to Marriage Equality: This week, Washington state Senator Mary Margaret Haugen (D) announced her support for a bill allowing same-sex marriage, becoming the final vote needed for passage in the state senate. The New Jersey legislature is similarly poised to pass marriage equality, as a key committee passed the bill earlier this week. As the Times explains, “The same-sex marriage bill is a priority for Democrats, led by the Senate president, Stephen M. Sweeney, who has said that his decision not to vote on a similar bill two years ago, when there was a Democratic governor who supported same-sex marriage, was “the biggest mistake” of his political career.” Unlike Washington, however, where Gov. Christine Gregoire has vowed to sign a same-sex marriage bill, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey promised to veto the bill, and then announced that the issue should be left up to a popular referendum. Such a vote seems likely to happen in Maine, where gay marriage advocates announced today they planned to put the issue on the November ballot, after collecting nearly twice the requisite signatures for the initiative. Oh, and retiring Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) has confirmed that he will marry his longtime partner Jim Ready, in Massachusetts, though a date has not yet been set.
Cool Video of the Week: One more shout-out to the annotated State of the Union. Click around in the video -- it’s really cool!
Good Read of the Week: James Suroweki on how private equity firms, like Bain, profit form the tax system. Preview: “For an industry that’s often held up as an exemplar of free-market capitalism, private equity is surprisingly dependent on government subsidies for its profits.”
Fun Video of the Week: Jon Stewart drives himself into a frenzy trying to understand Newt’s audacious hypocrisy regarding his marriages -- and the media’s complete failure to explain why the issue is important.
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