Several days ago James Vega carefully deconstructed one example of the way in which polling data can be distorted by commentators to support an “Americans say both side are equally to blame” argument even when the data itself shows nothing of the kind. At the same time, however, political commentators can also present arguments that ignore empirical data entirely and express what can only be described as a weird kind of political surrealism.
Case in point, Mike Murphy in Time:

…Saying the words [“Some beneficiaries pay more” and “lower benefit increases over time”] would mean the President is finally serious about facing the soaring cost of entitlements, with adjustments to future cost increases in Social Security and Medicare as well as a modest increase in what some must pay into the programs.
The Democratic leadership will violently oppose this, but if the President really aspires to use his political capital, as he says he does, then he must use it on his own party, where it can actually accomplish a result.
The President should not forget that the Republicans are also willing to do very unpopular things to confront the national-debt crisis. He should take advantage of that rare impulse of theirs, not dismiss it.

When one tries to unpack this argument, it comes to this:

To combat the riding cost of entitlements the president should do things that are unpopular with public and which will outrage and infuriate his political base.
After all, the GOP is equally willing to do very unpopular things to combat the rising cost of entitlements — things that are unpopular with the public but which will delight and thrill their political base.
The president would be foolish not to take advantage of this “rare” opportunity.

What? The commentary asserts the existence of a parallel “willingness to do unpopular things” between GOP and Dems where in fact no actual parallel exists, it proposes that Obama should prefer to expend his political capital fighting with his own party instead of fighting for his own agenda (the exact opposite of what Republicans think political capital should be used for when they are in power) because that is “where it can actually accomplish a result,” and it describes as a “rare” opportunity a proposal for him to do something that will please his opponents, anger his friends and antagonize the public all at the same time.
Even if one sincerely believes that reducing the cost of entitlements represents a critical national problem, this argument simply makes no logical sense. It is a verbal version of a surrealist painting. From a distance it appears as if it is actually presenting a rational political argument but when one looks more closely it dissolves into a completely incoherent cluster of words.

This article by Ruy Teixeira is cross-posted from the New Republic where it ran under the title “Good Speech, Bad Strategy.”
…There are two keys to achieving real political dominance for the new Obama coalition. First, it must be mobilized beyond presidential elections–in congressional elections, where turnout patterns don’t yet align very closely with presidential elections, and between elections, in the struggle to achieve legislative victories. Second, the Obama coalition must be widened to take in a larger share of the white working class. Otherwise, the hostility of these voters will undercut public support for the president’s agenda, as well as remaining a lurking threat in every election, particularly congressional ones.
The Obama team is not unaware of these necessities. But the strategy they’ve developed to address them isn’t entirely adequate. It seems to consist of emphasizing particular fights like immigration reform, gun control, same sex marriage, and climate change that appeal most strongly to different elements of the Obama coalition. This strategy does have merit. The thought is that even if all these fights don’t yield legislative victories (and they won’t so long as Republicans control part of Congress), they will nevertheless serve to generate more enthusiasm among key parts of the coalition, without imposing much of an electoral cost. Moreover, these fights are all substantively important in policy terms, so any victories attained will be important breakthroughs.
But the strategy has serious limitations. To begin with, even if these issues do little damage to Democrats’ standing among white working class voters, they will also do little to win their support. These voters are primarily looking for material improvements in their lives, improvements that are not possible without strong economic growth and the jobs, tight labor markets, and rising incomes such growth would bring. In a low-growth environment, these voters will remain exceptionally pessimistic and inclined to blame Democrats and government for their lack of upward mobility.
Even more serious, core groups of the Obama coalition will be weakened by continued slow growth. Obama was well-supported by these groups in 2012, but a sluggish economic environment, where unemployment continues pushing 8 percent, will try these voters’ patience. How much enthusiasm will Hispanics, blacks, youth, single women, etc., whose unemployment rates are considerably above the national average, continue to have for a party that cannot do more to improve economic conditions? Attrition in support will be inevitable in such a scenario and the opportunity to consolidate a dominant coalition will be lost.
How likely is it that slow growth will continue? Unfortunately, it appears to be a very serious possibility. The last quarter of 2012 actually saw the economy contract by .1 percent. And CBO’s latest economic projections, just released on February 5, anticipate that the economy will grow by only 1.4 percent this year (halving CBO’s previous projection) with an average unemployment rate of 7.9 percent. They project 2014 to be slightly better–2.6 percent growth and 7.8 percent unemployment–but the economy doesn’t really pick up until 2015. Even then, unemployment remains above 7 percent in 2015, above 6 percent in 2016, and doesn’t approximate full employment until 2017.
The reason for these gloomy projections is fiscal drag–that is, lower spending and higher taxes are subtracting demand from the economy, thereby slowing the still-fragile recovery. The fiscal cliff deal did considerable damage, chiefly due to the expiration of the payroll tax cut, which raised taxes 2 percent for middle and low income earners. The sequester will do more damage if implemented, indiscriminately cutting $85 billion from federal spending this year and every year thereafter for 10 years. And then there is possible further damage from whatever deal might be struck around the next extension of the debt ceiling, due in a few months (damage not included in the CBO projections).
It’s a bleak picture to be sure. What the economy really needs is something like Obama’s initial offer on a fiscal cliff deal. That offer included, besides tax increases on the wealthy and long-term cost reductions for Medicare, extensions of both unemployment insurance and the payroll tax holiday, as well as a roughly $50 billion jobs plan focused on infrastructure spending. The Republicans rejected the offer out of hand, of course, and the administration quickly yielded on the payroll tax cut and the jobs spending, leaving just the unemployment benefits extension. Rescinding the Bush tax cuts for those with $450,000 in income and higher was the laudable centerpiece of the deal, making the tax code fairer and helping to reduce long-term deficits, but that did nothing to alter the contractionary nature of the deal.
Now Obama has to deal with the extremely contractionary sequestered spending cuts. One of his stated operating principles on dealing with the sequester is to “do no harm” to the economy. However, the only way to really do that would be to avoid short-term spending cuts altogether.
Will he try to do that? It’s possible. But it doesn’t help matters that he has consistently evoked the possibility of a Grand Bargain with the Republicans that would, in a “balanced” way, attain $1.5 trillion in debt reduction over ten years. In all likelihood, that would mean agreeing to hundreds of billions in cuts (Obama would be lucky if only half ($700 billion) of the total savings was from spending cuts; Republicans will demand much more), starting this year and continuing until 2023. Leaving aside the content of the cuts, we know this means one thing that is indisputably bad–subtracting demand from the economy while it is still struggling, thereby making CBO’s gloomy economic projections more and more likely.
It therefore seems that another contractionary deal, despite Obama’s stated commitment to “do no harm,” is a distinct possibility. He would be well-advised to forget about such a Grand Bargain-type deal, which is not necessary in the short run (the deficit is already declining, as the CBO report notes, and will continue to do so for several years) and concentrate on what is necessary: growth. This starts with delaying or ending the sequester. As Paul Krugman points out, “kicking the can down the road,” so derided by Washingon commentators and elites, is in reality the responsible thing to do, given the state of today’s economy.
Then Obama should move to actually getting the economy some help. One obvious way to do this is through infrastructure investment. As Neil Irwin recently noted, low interest rates, millions of unemployed construction workers, and high economic development payoffs make such investment amazingly close to a free lunch. Obama did call for more infrastructure investment in his SOTU, including a new proposal for infrastructure repair called “Fix-It-First”, but this was in the wish list portion of his speech and had no clear urgency or timeline attached to it. These investments need to be moved up to short-term priority number one.
Indeed, if any deal is cut with the Republicans, it should be to put such investments immediately in the pipeline. We need a Grand Bargain for growth far more than we need a Grand Bargain for deficit reduction. Besides as many analysts have noted, the best medicine for deficit reduction is a higher growth rate, so the two goals are intimately and virtuously related. Add a half point to the growth rate and you knock $1.5 trillion off the national debt over ten years, thereby achieving Obama’s current debt reduction target.
And then there is the political payoff. The faster we move into a high growth economy, the better the opportunities for consolidating and expanding the Obama coalition. Conversely, if we stagger along for the next several years, the coalition has an excellent chance of falling apart. A very simple equation captures what’s at stake here:
Demographics + Growth = Dominance
Democrats have the demographics part of the formula already. Now what they need is the growth part to achieve electoral and policy dominance. That is the real challenge for Obama and his party if they wish to see the many worthy ideas in his State of the Union become reality.

The following article, by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Let’s call it what it really is. The Republicans have a gun pointed to the head of the American economy and threaten to shoot if they don’t get their way. They lost at the ballot box – their positions are unpopular in the polls — so they have abandoned the democratic process, and are once again resorting to what amounts to economic terrorism.
And right now it looks as though they are prepared to pull the trigger as the nation speeds toward the economically disastrous, across the board, draconian spending cuts mandated by the so-called “sequester.”
Over the last few days economists, Defense officials, and the President have all issued clear warnings that if these massive across the board spending cuts go into effect, they will cost in the range of 750,000 jobs, increase the unemployment rate and potentially throw the economy into a double-dip recession.
The Defense Department warned that 800,000 civilian personnel could be put on one day a week leave – effectively cutting their pay by 20% for the rest of this fiscal year – and significantly damaging the nation’s military readiness.
The automatic cuts resulting from “the sequester” would kick 70,000 children out of Head Start Programs. They would cut the ranks of first responders like firefighters and police – as well as teachers, and air traffic controllers.
Love long lines at TSA airport security check points? Think how you’ll feel standing in longer lines after the number of TSA employees has been slashed by the “sequester.”
Then there are the cuts to food inspections, the FBI and law enforcement – or cutbacks in the number of people who process Social Security and Medicare claims.
Now House Speaker John Boehner is scrambling to deny that the GOP has any responsibility for these massive automatic cuts. But that’s like a hostage-taker claiming that it’s not his fault that he is holding a hostage at gunpoint, it’s the responsibility of the family of the hostage that won’t pay the ransom.
The fact is that this current man-made crisis is one in a series of Republican hostage-taking episodes. In each case the GOP threatens blow up the economy if it doesn’t get what it wants. We simply can’t allow the GOP to force its unpopular austerity proposals on the country through these undemocratic means.
What is the ransom they are demanding? They want to end Medicare and replace it with a voucher program that costs seniors $6,000 more per year and makes a fortune for private insurance companies. They want to slash Social Security benefits. They want to permanently cut funding for education, child nutrition, and public safety. They want to shrink the size of government and protect tax loopholes for the wealthy.
But the GOP can’t win these things through the democratic process. We just had an election where the voters overwhelmingly rejected their positions. Their positions have no support in the polls. That’s why they’ve resorted once again to hostage-taking to force their minority positions on the American people.

Read more…

After the tea party emits its dying gasp and historians get about collecting the better accounts of its wreckage, they should include Ed Kilgore’s Washington Monthly post, “Hurricane Rick,” which surveys the mess Governor Rick Scott and tea party state legislators have created in Florida.
It’s not just Scott’s shameless assault on voting rights that has done so much damage to Floridians’ hopes for a better future. As Kilgore points out:

…Floridians from every corner of the state have suffered alike during the last two years from an unusually virulent strain of Tea Party Government led by a governor as scary as any this side of The Walking Dead, Rick Scott.
In a cover article for Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer profiles the enduring damage Scott and company have deliberately inflicted on Florida’s public sector, in areas ranging from health care to transportation to the environment to mosquito control. But one pattern of misgovernment she notes that is especially appalling is the state’s refusal to accept even the most generous and badly needed federal funds on the purely political grounds of not wanting any truck with the evil socialist Obama administration.
Florida’s refusal of high-speed rail funds for an abundantly eligible and long-awaited corridor from Tampa to Orlando was the first and most obvious self-inflicted wound of this nature. And an impending decision (on which Scott is now being cagey after many months of suggesting he would join the other Deep South Republican refuseniks) could lead to rejection of a vastly generous federal match for a Medicaid expansion that Florida with its massive uninsured population could definitely use.

Scott’s disastrous reign will not be easily corrected, As Kilgore notes, quoting Mencimer:

Even if Scott ends up a one-term governor, his legacy won’t easily be reversed. When he rejected the high-speed rail money, the state passed up an opportunity to upgrade its underfunded transit system that it may not soon see again. Florida’s internationally renowned mosquito control system took a half century to build, but only three years to decimate. Likewise with public health, says Nan Rich, who fought the cuts in the state Senate: “The infrastructure is being destroyed and responding to public health crises becomes more difficult,” she says. “I shudder to think if what happened with Hurricane Sandy had happened here.”

We can hope that Florida’s vote for President Obama’s re-election signals that an important lesson has been learned by Florida voters. But Scott’s destructive decisions will likely reverberate long after he is gone. As Kilgore concludes, “…Like one of Florida’s devastating hurricanes: the damage happens very rapidly, while the recovery may never be complete.”

At Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall introduces an important post by Theda Skocpol, explaining why all of the fear-mongering about the Affordable Care Act is a waste of time. Says Skocpol:

I very much appreciate your continuing coverage of the ObamaCare implementation issues, especially the decisions various Republican governors and legislatures are taking for now. But on this latest about four reasons why ObamaCare might “fail” let me demur — as an expert, along with Lawrence Jacobs, who not only has studied and written a widely used book about health reform’s enactment and early implementation but is also continuing to research the various paths in the fifty states.
There is WAY too much doomsaying about all of the twists and turns. How many times has the blogosphere declared ObamaCare dead? Or claimed that some development, such as the grant to the states of authority to accept or reject components, would prove fatal? Experts like Jost and Gruber are implicated in overhyping too. Jost is a legal expert. Gruber an economist. Both are experts in their domains, but not in politics. Neither seems to understand the relatively protracted political contention that accompanies big expansons of the U.S. welfare state like this one. Social Security was opposed by the GOP for fifteen years after enactment, and came close to fiscal death various times. Medicare was very ideologically fraught for years. (Both have been revived as partisan battles lately.). But these programs have all survived, and so will ObamaCare.
Public opinion has always been partisan divided on the reform overall, but the key components have almost all been and remain very popular. They are coming into concrete existence in states with at least half the national population. A number of GOP governors have already blinked on rejecting Medicaid expansions, and others will — plus more will be defeated in 2014 (e.g., in Maine, where the legislature is ready to move ahead, and probably in Florida, too). Even the exchanges are getting quiet cooperation in various refusnik states, and there are advantages to some degree of national standardization in the exchanges, for which the federal government is now widely responsible. (Back when ObamaCare was passed into law, liberal bloggers were declaring doom over the fact that fifty states would have to design exchanges; now doom is being declared over the fact that half the exchanges will be strongly shaped by the feds. Which is it? Or is it just perpetual doom?)
This will be a long and contested process, but there is no prospect whatsoever that this law will be repealed or permanently thrown off track. Yes, the GOP will cut back vital funding if it gets windows, but those windows will not be likely to last. Before long, moreover, supporters will be able to point to real, popular gains in wellbeing in a lot of states — and ask why the laggard or refusnik states are denying these to their citizens. At the very least, bloggers and center-left news outlets ought to be pointing to the positive policy and political possibilities, not just declaring doom again and again.
Number four on your list is a serious problem. The rest are interim or overhyped. And number five is this: too much doomsaying among liberal media people.

Good points all. Remember also that the doomsayers, hand-wringers and Chicken Littles all said the same thing about Medicare, and few of them would give it up today. The implementation process will be challenging, as Marshall notes. But a little support, faith and flexibility are what is now needed to insure that the ACA will prove to be an important first step towards a system that provides comprehensive care for every person in America.

By now anyone who has given serious thought to how America can secure a thriving middle class has concluded that the restoration of a strong labor movement is absolutely essential. In addition, the amount of time, energy and expense the GOP has lavished on various union-bashing projects is all the indication anyone should need that a strong union movement is also required for preventing a right-wing takeover of all of America’s political institutions.
Thus, the future of the labor movement is an issue of immediate concern to the Democratic party and all progressives. Toward that end, The Nation is hosting a forum, “How Can Labor Be Saved?,” featuring eight posts:

“How Can Labor Be Saved? American unions are in deep trouble. What’s the way out?”
by Josh Eidelson
“Unions: Put Organizing First: Don’t forget that political power is intrinsically linked to organizing power” by Kate Bronfenbrenner
“Make Organizing a Civil Right: It’s time to tie worker rights to “Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall” by Richard D. Kahlenberg and Moshe Z. Marvit
“What Labor Can Learn From the Obama Campaign: It’s time to harness data” by Suresh Naidu and Dorian T. Warren
“Build a Democracy Movement: ‘Money Out, Voting In’ should become labor’s mantra” by Larry Cohen
“Become a Movement of All Workers: Let’s stop waiting for the government to tell us who can organize” by Bhairavi Desai
“Time for Labor to Mobilize Immigrants: Immigration reform can be labor’s game-changer” by Maria Elena Durazo
“Fight for the Whole Society: To survive, unions need to be better neighbors” by Karen GJ Lewis

Most of the entries can be read for free, with a couple of them requiring a subscription to one of America’s top progressive magazines.

Zachary A. Goldfarb’s WaPo article, “Obama to press for stopgap sequester fix” provides an update on the white house’s latest strategy for addressing the “deep, automatic cuts to domestic and defense spending” that are scheduled if a deal is not struck.
Goldfarb reports that President Obama, joined by “firefighters and other emergency personnel, will press Congress to pass a short-term measure that would delay the cuts, known as the sequester, for a period of time until Congress can pass a permanent fix.” Further, adds Goldfarb,

Obama favors replacing the sequester with a combination of spending cuts in automatic programs like Medicare and Medicaid and new tax revenue, raised by scaling back tax breaks that benefit the wealthy and select industries, such as energy firms. With a sweeping deal unlikely in two weeks, Obama is pushing for a short-term measure to delay the start of the sequester — such as one proposed last week by Senate Democrats that would use alternative spending cuts and tax hikes to postpone the sequester through the end of the year.
…While the cuts — the first of $1.2 trillion set to occur over a decade — may start March 1, they would only be felt over time. The cuts could be devastating for government contractors, civilian employees and the overall economy — which economists say could lose 750,000 jobs as a result of the deep reductions in spending.

Writing in today’s Washington Monthly Political Animal, TDS managing editor Ed Kilgore adds,

He’ll do what he can to make sure Republicans take the blame for the sequester, and then will fight to undo some of the damage in the immediately ensuring negotiations over the expiration of the continuing resolution on appropriations. But assuming Republicans have permanently eschewed the threat of a debt default, March should close the curtain on the last regularly scheduled fiscal crises until the midterms or perhaps even longer.

Meanwhile, The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent has an interesting argument that the Republicans are far more vulnerable than the president and Democrats if the sequestration actually kicks in:

The Hill reports this morning, however, that Republicans say they’re not worried about the political impact of the sequester. They tell the paper that they will be able to make the case to the public that the sequester was Obama’s idea, meaning he’ll take the blame for the damage it does.
This is ridiculous on the merits: Lawmakers in both parties voted for the sequester. But the more important point here is that this argument is an implicit admission of the weakness and incoherence of the GOP’s position in the sequester battle.
Here’s why: It’s an implicit admission that deep spending cuts are bad politically for whichever party owns them. After all, if this were not the case, then Republicans would not need to try to shift the blame to Obama for the cuts that are coming. Yet Republicans, and not Democrats, are the ones who are advocating for replacing the sequester only with deep spending cuts!
Indeed, in that very same Hill piece, Republicans also say letting the sequester go forward is the right thing to do for the country, since we need deep spending cuts to save the country from fiscal Armageddon. By contrast, Obama and Democrats are arguing against spending cuts of this magnitude; they’re insisting that the sequester cuts be replaced in part with new revenues drawn from closing high end tax loopholes, to avert layoffs and cuts to government that will hurt poor and middle class Americans. In other words, only one party — the GOP — is advocating for the very thing that Republicans themselves implicitly concede is politically perilous!
The basic dynamic here will not be changed by the argument that the sequester was the White House’s “idea.” The public will fully appreciate the true nature of the two sets of priorities on display here — particularly when Obama cranks up the public campaigning on this in earnest.

It’s yet another game of ‘political chicken,’ and it does appear that the president has an advantage in the blame game. There is no guarantee, however, that the Republicans will behave in a way consistent with either logic or self-preservation. But their party is already badly tarnished as being more interested in obstruction than good government. One more major disaster for the GOP could cripple their image enough to insure that Dems will hold the Senate and make better-than-expected inroads in the House in 2014.

As J.P. Green noted yesterday, Senate Democrats face a daunting year in 2014, and Republicans have an edge with fewer vulnerable seats up for re-election. Republicans have seven fewer seats up in 2014, and the “seven most imperiled” U.S. Senate seats up in 2014 are now held by Democrats.
But Democrats do have one significant advantage in the person of Guy Cecil, executive director of Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Calling Cecil “the brains behind the Democrats’ improbable Senate showings in 2010 and 2012,” Jonathan Weisman reports in the New York Times:

Mr. Cecil’s return as executive director of the committee is notable in a city accustomed to political consultants cashing in for big money “downtown” — at lobbying firms and with influence peddlers off Capitol Hill. In 2010, Mr. Cecil helped engineer Mr. Bennet’s successful defense of his seat, one of the unexpected wins that kept Democrats in control of the Senate even as the party suffered a historic defeat in the House. Most assumed Democrats would lose the Senate as the 2012 season began. With Mr. Cecil directing forces, the party gained two seats.
… Mr. Cecil’s approach to Senate elections goes back to the vicious 1998 re-election campaign of South Carolina’s Ernest Hollings, the last Democratic Senate victory in that state, and 2000, when he helped former Gov. Mel Carnahan of Missouri defeat John Ashcroft, a Republican, despite the fact that Mr. Carnahan had died in a plane crash three weeks before Election Day.
Mr. Cecil tries to resist national political winds and tailor each campaign to the particular candidates and the states they are running in. Republican campaigns tend to ride national waves, running on broad national issues like the size and scope of government, the level of taxation and the defense of the homeland. Mr. Cecil had different ideas for different Democratic candidates.
For instance, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota ran on “North Dakota values,” a languishing farm bill and essential air service to rural America. Sherrod Brown, practically buried under an avalanche of Republican advertising, ran as David against Goliath, even if he was the incumbent in Ohio.
… At times last cycle, Mr. Cecil courted controversy. In Wisconsin, he backed the candidacy of Representative Tammy Baldwin, a liberal lesbian from Madison, when many Democrats wanted a more moderate voice from a rural corner of the state. Ms. Baldwin won, beating a four-term governor, Tommy Thompson, the Republicans’ candidate of choice.
In Missouri, Mr. Cecil encouraged Senator Claire McCaskill to pull off one of the most clever feats of the campaign cycle, an advertisement just days before the Republican primary that “blasted” Representative Todd Akin as the most conservative, most vehemently anti-Obama candidate in the Republican field. The effort was seen as a boost for Mr. Akin, the opponent she preferred.
“He understood the complicated needle I had to thread, running a disciplined campaign and seeing if we could end up with a general election candidate we could beat,” Ms. McCaskill said.

Weisman characterizes Cecil, who comes from a working-class family, as “true believer in the Democratic cause, not a hired gun waiting to cash out.” Dems could use a few more like Cecil at the helms of our state Democratic parties.

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s HuffPo post “How the State of the Union Worked” credits President Obama with an exceptionally lucid and compelling SOTU address:

Briefly, the speech worked via frame evocation. Not statement, evocation — the unconscious and automatic activation in the brains of listeners of a morally-based progressive frame that made sense of what the president said.
When a frame is repeatedly activated, it is strengthened. Obama’s progressive frame was strengthened not only in die-hard progressives, but also in partial progressives, those who are progressive on some issues and conservative on others — the so-called moderates, swing voters, independents, and centrists. As a result, 77 percent of listeners approved of the speech, 53 percent strongly positive and 24 percent somewhat positive, with only 22 percent negative. When that deep progressive frame is understood and accepted by a 77 percent margin, the president has begun to move America toward a progressive moral vision.

Lakoff sees significance in the telling response of the opposition to Obama’s SOTU. “John Boehner looked shamed as he slumped, sulking in his chair, as if trying to disappear” and “Marco Rubio’s response was stale and defensive: the old language wasn’t working and Rubio kept talking in rising tones indicating uncertainty.” He adds:

The president set his theme powerfully in the first few sentences…First, Obama recalled Kennedy — a strong, unapologetic liberal. “Partners” evokes working together, an implicit attack on conservative stonewalling, while “for progress” makes clear his progressive direction. “To improve it is the task of us all” evokes the progressive theme that we’re all in this together with the goal of improving the common good. “The grit and determination of the American people” again says we work together, while incorporating the “grit and determination” stereotype of Americans pulling themselves up by their bootstraps — overcoming a “grinding war” and “grueling recession.” He specifically and wisely did not pin the war and recession on the Bush era Republicans, as he reasonably could have. That would have divided Democrats from Republicans…Then he moved on seamlessly to the “millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded,” which makes rewarding that work and determination “the task of us all.”

President Obama “provided a patriotic American progressive vision that seamlessly adapts the heart of the conservative message…We, the citizens, use the government to protect us and maximally enable us all to make use of individual initiative and free enterprise.” explains Lakoff. He gives Obama high marks for a well-paced conclusion:

And it was a smash finish! Highlighting his gun safety legislation by introducing one after another of the people whose lives were shattered by well-reported gun violence. With each introduction came the reframe “They deserve a vote” over and over and over. He was chiding the Republicans not just for being against the gun safety legislation, but for being unwilling to even state their opposition in public, which a vote would require. The president is all too aware that, even in republican districts, there is great support for gun safety reform, support that threatens conservative representatives. “They deserve a vote” is a call for moral accounting from conservative legislators. It is a call for empathy for the victims in a political form, a form that would reveal the heartlessness, the lack of republican empathy for the victims. “They deserve a vote” shamed the republicans in the House. As victim after victim stood up while the republicans sat slumped and close-mouthed in their seats, shame fell on the republicans.
And then it got worse for republicans. Saving the most important for last — voting reform — President Obama introduced Desiline Victor, a 102-year spunky African American Florida woman who was told she would have to wait six hours to vote. She hung in there, exhausted but not defeated, for many hours and eventually voted. The room burst into raucous applause, putting to shame the republicans who are adopting practices and passing laws to discourage voting by minority groups.
And with the applause still ringing, he introduced police officer Brian Murphy who held off armed attackers at the Sikh Temple in Minneapolis, taking twelve bullets and lying in a puddle of his blood while still protecting the Sikhs. When asked how he did it, he replied, “That’s just how we’re made.”

Putting the speech in perspective, Lakoff limns the power of Obama’s vision:

President Obama, in this speech, created what cognitive scientists call a “prototype” — an ideal American defined by a contemporary progressive vision that incorporates a progressive market with individual opportunity and initiative. It envisions an ideal citizenry that is in charge of the government, forcing the president and the Congress to do the right thing.
…The president can’t do it. Congress can’t do it. Only we can as citizens, by adopting the president’s vision, thinking in his moral frames, and speaking out from that vision whenever possible. Speaking out is at the heart of being a citizen, speaking out is political action, and only if an overwhelming number of us speak out, and live out, this American vision, will the president and the Congress be forced to do what is best for all.

Obama’s SOTU address was a transformative departure, in Lakoff’s view. “That is how the president has changed public discourse. He has changed it at the level that counts, the deepest level, the moral level.” The palpable discomfort of Republican leaders reacting to the SOTU address, alluded to by Lakoff, also indicates the power of the president’s frame — yet another testament that the president’s messaging has matured and he is rising to the challenge of his times.

by Stan Greenberg


James, our panel of swing voters, and I all agree: President Obama gave a good speech on Tuesday night. The president was right to focus on the economy and the future of the middle class. By taking on the issues that matter to everyday Americans, he was able to not only shift the polling numbers — but to shift the agenda, from austerity to growth.