Obama's passionate pragmatism

Obama has always presented himself as both pragmatist and idealist, projecting faith that if we "uphold our ideals through the hard, often frustrating, but absolutely necessary work of self-government" we will make incremental progress toward audacious goals: a new age of broadly shared prosperity, plentiful sustainable energy, affordable health care, nuclear weapons reduction (and ultimately eradication), an end to global poverty, arrested global warming.  In tonight's SOTU, he wedded the pragmatism and the idealism powerfully, reasoning with understated passion, shouting less than in his inaugural but building to a powerful climax of moral exhortation as he invoked Newtown, recapturing also the balanced cadences and grammatical parallelism that marked his speeches in 2008.

Obama's repeated plea to the nation tonight was to face reality: his tone was relentless reasonability. He spoke with a distilled fluency of a man who has been articulating the same values and proposing essentially the same policies (excepting gun control)* for six years on the national stage and now speaks with the knowledge that through several permutations and waves of oppositional hysteria he has still has (or has regained) a majority with him on the big stuff.  And so he argued, not only as if he were himself convinced but convinced that we are convinced: Deficit reduction has to be balanced. Undocumented immigrants have to be offered a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reform. The nation has to invest in the pillars of shared prosperity: alternative energy, education, infrastructure. Climate change is real and wreaking havoc.  The level of gun violence we live with is insane. Everyone has a right to vote without standing in line for five, six, seven hours. As he said with respect to immigration reform: "we know what needs to be done."

Here are a few of the reality checks -- arguments delivered with a "who can dispute it?" mien:

The tribute Obama deserves

has been delivered by Jonathan Chait:

What can be said without equivocation is that Obama has proven himself morally, intellectually, temperamentally, and strategically. In my lifetime, or my parents’, he is easily the best president. On his own terms, and not merely as a contrast to an unacceptable alternative, he overwhelmingly deserves reelection.

Chait understands that true pragmatism is the rarest and most powerful lever of leadership:

Obama’s résumé of accomplishments is broad and deep, running the gamut from economic to social to foreign policy. The general thrust of his reforms, especially in economic policy, has been a combination of politically radical and ideologically moderate. The combination has confused liberals into thinking of Obamaism as a series of sad half-measures, and conservatives to deem it socialism, but the truth is neither. Obama’s agenda has generally hewed to the consensus of mainstream economists and policy experts. What makes the agenda radical is that, historically, vast realms of policy had been shaped by special interests for their own benefit. Plans to rationalize those things, to write laws that make sense, molder on think-tank shelves for years, even generations. They are often boring. But then Obama, in a frenetic burst of activity, made many of them happen all at once.