Obama portrays a nation at risk in bid to reset national agenda

Obama gave a great speech today, focused on reversing rising income inequality, which he called "the defining challenge of our time." It's been a dispiriting autumn, and as Obama's returned to the bully pulpit in recent days I've thought that maybe I'm past getting keyed up as he cranks up the rhetoric.  But he didn't do that. He offered new thinking and reframed our political discourse. He expanded and refocused the narrative he's been developing throughout his political career.

The outlines of that narrative were familiar. Throughout its history, the United States has thrived because it's periodically widened the circles of opportunity, extended the means to pursue happiness to previously excluded groups, made new investments in shared prosperity. Around 1980, though, the country took a wrong turn, and the American dream is fraying.  As president, he will channel popularly willed recommitment to shared prosperity.

This time around, though, there were several differences. The stylized, compressed precis of U.S. history that's an Obama speech staple was focused more sharply on economic turning points.  The wrong turn of the last 30-plus years was ascribed in large part to global economic forces, in a sense depoliticized. The faith that political action will right the ship was tempered by a warning that rising inequality, unchecked, could take us to a point of no return.

Finally, an economic argument that sustainable prosperity depends on reversing the widening wealth gap was more fleshed out than ever before. I have never read a presidential speech that cited as many economic studies.  Those studies and a battery of stats were deployed to make several key points: that inequality is at an historic high point; that the U.S. lags other wealthy countries in economic mobility; that those born in poverty in the U.S. today are likely to remain locked in; that poverty is not just a "minority" problem but touches more than half of Americans at some point in their lives; and that rising inequality is a drag on growth.

MIchelle brings Obama's story home

In his bid to move the political center back to the left in the wake of the Reagan revolution, Obama has always relied on an idealized abstract of American history, casting it as a story of ever-expanding commitment to shared prosperity -- prosperity shared ever more widely.  It's an oral slideshow, a series of historical tableaus delivered with incantatory parallel phrasing and refrain. In his speech on election night 2008, for example, he invoked a 106 year-old African American voter as a witness to the panorama:

She was there for the buses in Montgomery, the hoses in Birmingham, a bridge in Selma, and a preacher from Atlanta who told a people that "We Shall Overcome." Yes we can.

A man touched down on the moon, a wall came down in Berlin, a world was connected by our own science and imagination. And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change. Yes we can.

Toward the end of her speech tonight, Michelle Obama deployed the same kind of narrative, with the same political message:

Attention, Tomasky: Obama always links prosperity to fairness

Michael Tomasky warns that there's a missing link in Obama's newfound populism: while he is talking to the American people about fairness, Republicans keep talking (misleadingly) about growth.  Democrats need to win the argument about growth, because growth means jobs. And that means arguing explicitly that their policies will lead not just to shared prosperity, but to more prosperity:

What Obama needs to do more forcefully is make the next step of the argument by answering the questions: Why must fairness be restored? What will it lead to? To liberals, it’s enough that it will lead to a fairer society. Therefore, it doesn’t even occur to many liberals that the “What will it lead to?” question even needs to be answered. A fairer society is enough. But for many Americans, it’s not enough. A fairer society is fine, they think, if we can afford it. But what these Americans want is a society where there are lots of good jobs. A prosperous society. So what Obama and his speechwriters should be hoping people summarizing his speeches would say is something like: he’s for building up the middle class and making the rich pay more because things are out of whack and unfair, and because doing so will create a more prosperous society. That’s the missing piece.

I'm afraid that the missing piece is a chimera. Democrats cannot get it out of their heads that Obama just is not saying the right things. Perhaps he and his administration don't drive them home with the right sound bytes or repetitiveness -- or perhaps a populace just will not hear when unemployment is north of 8%.  Perhaps, too, Obama went semi-mute for a few months in 2011 (May to September at most) on the broad economic themes he's been repeating throughout his career on the national stage. But as long as I've been listening to the man (and reading his books and speeches), Obama has insisted that fairness and prosperity are hand-in-glove -- and that prosperity that is not broadly shared, that accrues mainly to a wealthy minority, has repeatedly (1890s, 1920s, noughties) proved unsustainable.

Liberal Reagan redux

E.J. Dionne compares Obama's structural approach to the SOTU to Reagan's while contrasting the two presidents' political philosophies:

Reagan laid out what became the major themes of his campaign, including not only the nation’s recovery from economic turmoil but also his central philosophical purpose: a continuing battle against “the tendency of government to grow.”

Obama’s speech was Reagan’s turned on its head. Like Reagan, Obama previewed his election arguments in a philosophically aggressive way. But Obama’s claim was the opposite of Reagan’s. Obama spoke of government’s essential role in ensuring shared prosperity and in creating an America “built to last” — a slogan drawn, perhaps not accidentally, from truck commercials for General Motors, the company whose rescue Obama engineered.

Dionne seems mildly surprised by the reverse-Reaganism:

It was to be expected that, in the course of his State of the Union address, President Obama would mention the killing of Osama bin Laden, whose death represented the culmination of the battle against terrorism that began on Sept. 11, 2001.

Far less expected was Obama’s use of the bin Laden episode to present a community-minded worldview that contrasts so sharply with the highly individualistic and anti-government message that has been heard over and over from the Republicans seeking to replace him.

The surprise is somewhat warranted by the infuriating year in which Obama directed his indignation at "Congress" and "Washington" as he tried to cut a deal with adversaries openly devoted to destroying him. But that was a detour (that ended last Labor Day). Obama's whole career -- on the national stage, at least -- has been an extended attempt to turn Reaganism on its head.