Hope from the SOTU for Obama and the Democrats?

Joe Conason takes the most thoughtful approach I've seen to arguing that President Obama's State of the Union speech was a significantly constructive moment for the President and the Democratic Party. He argues that Obama offered an appealing and popular vision of the American future "that contrasts powerfully with the partisan negativity and apocalyptic pessimism voiced by the Republicans."

In Solid State: Forget the Haters—Obama Delivered New York Observer 01/26/2011, he argues, "The president cannot expect the Republicans to move his agenda forward during the next two years, but he can start to demonstrate why their own agenda is empty and stagnant." And, "Gently but persuasively, the president suggested that the electoral turn toward the Republicans last November was a mistake, and began to explain why."

This is important. Obama has articulated a vision that is, in contrast to that of the opposition Party, hopeful and even inspiring. Conason also points out that it was a dramatic contrast to the gloomy vision articulated in the Republican responses by Congressman Paul Ryan and the loopy babbling of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. The latter, he said, "repeated the same stale talking points that always issue from her mouth when she isn't inventing fables about our history."

Joe's hopeful take on the SOTU is reasonable on its face. Presumably he's also drawing on his intensive research into the thinking, personalities and tactics of the Republican Party over the last 20 years, including "Gingrich Revolution", when the Republicans also had taken a House majority against a Democratic President in the 1994 elections.

But, as he also notes at the end of his hopeful piece, "the true state of the Union is more perilous than Mr. Obama dared to admit." The factual flexibility the US has on its deficits and debt as a result of the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency in a system of (mostly) free-floating currency values gives the federal government a lot of leeway. But the realities of climate change are not going away.

And, in an issue that is more urgently pressing, the US has a high unemployment rate that the Administration is simply not addressing in an effective way. That, more than anything else, gave this speech a weird disconnect with the real state of the American public. It polled exceptionally well in the flash polling just afterward. But that's almost certainly because Obama kept things on a very high rhetorical plane, mostly avoiding saying anything that would quickly anger anyone.

Robert Reich makes the point this way in The President Ignored the Elephant in the Room 01/26/2011:

. . . the President’s failure to address the decoupling of American corporate profits from American jobs, and explain specifically what he’ll do to get jobs back, not only risks making his grand plans for reviving the nation’s “competitiveness” seem somewhat beside the point but also cedes to Republicans the dominant narrative.

The address he gave last night could have been given (indeed, was given) by Democrats in the 1980s when Japan seemed to threaten America’s preeminence. Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manifesto, "Putting People First," laid out the case. Only now the competitive threat comes from China. [my emphasis]

Both political and economic conditions were different in 1995 for Bill Clinton. The economy was recovering and would become turbo-charged from the dot.com bubble. And as bad as the Republicans were, FOX News hadn't started up yet and the national media were only a few years into the steep slide in quality they've been on ever since. Obama and the Democrats today face a very different situation.

Reich's complaint about Obama ceding the dominant narrative to the Republicans isn't necessarily inconsistent with Joe Conason's more hopeful view. Let's put it this way: Joe's hoped-for scenario may play out well for Obama and the Dems - but only if they do a better job at challenging the Republican narrative about government and the economy. Cute anecdotes about the gubment not being able to regulate salmon right won't get them there.

Reich also expresses understandable reservations about the Sputnik metaphor:

It's one thing to challenge the nation to re-embark on the equivalent of a race to the moon when most people feel confident about their own family finances, but quite another when economic security is as endemic as now.

I really hate to say it, but Sarah Palin's hick response to the SOTU - a "Spudnut" moment (?!?) - actually illustrates how little the "Sputnik" imagery registers with a lot of people. Even though what Palin says is so goofy it gives dumb a bad name. See Dave Neiwert's account with video, Speaking of 'WTF moments': Palin launches into weird babble about Spudnuts C&L 01/27/2011. Dave also has a memorable description of Palin's image as "her whole naughty-librarian schtick."

Also, it's one thing to lay out a potentially useful framework for putting the Republicans in a less favorable light. Actually engaging in political conflict with them in ways that create a sharp and clear contrast between the parties is another. We'll see if Obama is willing to do that. At this point, Harry Reid looks far more willing to join that battle that the President is. Digby has already caught Obama's political honcho David Axelrod waffling on defending Social Security. (Veto-proof Bipartisanship Hullabaloo 01/27/2011)

That's a good two-word way to define the problem with getting to where Joe Conason is hoping the vision of the SOTU will eventually take the Democratic Party: "Social Security". As long as core Democratic constituencies have to worry about the Obama Administration accepting Social Security Phaseout, neither Obama nor the Democratic Party will be able to do what they need to do to change the dominant Republican narrative.

Tags: barack obama, democratic party, joe conason, social security, state of the union 2011

More reactions to Obama's SOTU

Here is the discussion of the SOTU by Sleepy Mark Shields and former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson just after the speech:



Short version, Gerson: He didn't snivel to the Republicans enough.

Short version, Sleepy Mark: I stayed up late for this?

By far the silliest piece I've seen is Howard Fineman's, Obama State Of The Union 2011: Love Train In The House! Huffington Post 01/25/2011. Why did the HuffPo hire that guy? Fineman apparently thought he was at a Grammy Awards ceremony. And if the evolution of the SOTU stays on its current path, we may be there within a couple of years. We could have a comedian introduce it, pop music bands (bland enough not to offend Republicans, of course, so they would have to probably be soft-rock Christian bands) and have a big red carpet arrival event beforehand.

Historian David Hollinger in Class act, missed opportunity Berkeley Blog 01/26/2011 praises the SOTU while putting it in the never-miss-an-opportunity-to-miss-an-opportunity category:

Classy, statesman-like speech ...

Yet he could have used the opportunity to call attention to the drastic gap that has developed since the Reagan era between the rich and the poor in this country. He passes up one opportunity after another to do this, apparently because he believes it would come across as "divisive" and will hurt what chances he has of achieving bi-partisan cooperation. This is a sufficiently huge feature of the nation today that it is a troubling weakness of Obama’s leadership that he has not found a way to focus more attention on it even as he presents himself as ready to "work with the Republicans" to solve the nation's problems. [my emphasis]

Still, he thinks Obama crafted his speech well for the political moment: "He delivered a speech carefully crafted to deal with his immediate, highly constrained circumstances. He plays the cards he is dealt, and he reads them well."

Jason Linkins was apparently trying to be cute in this article, State Of The Union Successfully Unites America Around Oily Fish Huffington Post 01/26/2011. But he hits on an important point without elaborating it. He relies on a quick-reaction report on the SOTU's public reception that indicated that this portion was the one that stuck in most people's minds:

We live and do business in the information age, but the last major reorganization of the government happened in the age of black and white TV. There are twelve different agencies that deal with exports. There are at least five different entities that deal with housing policy. Then there's my favorite example: the Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them in when they're in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked.

This is the kind of anecdote that populate Chamber of Commerce speeches and conservative chain e-mails, anecdotes that are catchy and difficult for most people to verify quickly.

That kind of anecdotes promotes the Republican Party's framing of gubment regulations of business as evil. They go together with bumper-sticker slogans like "The Solution Is Less Government". The Democratic President needs to be promoting Democratic framing of issues instead. Or maybe I should say, Democrats need the Democratic President needs to be promoting Democratic framing of issues.

Mr. Framing himself, George Lakoff, in a piece written before SOTU, talks about the current state of the Democrats' framing problem in The "new centrism" and its discontents Berekley Blog 01/25/2011. I don't entirely buy some of the specifics of Lakoff's approach. But he's certainly on the right track:

When a Democrat "moves to the center," he is adopting a conservative position — or the language of a conservative position. Even if only the language is adopted and not the policy, there is an important effect. Using conservative language activates the conservative view, not only of the given issue, but the conservative worldview in general, which in turn strengthens the conservative worldview in the brains of those listening. That leads to more people thinking conservative thoughts, and hence supporting conservative positions on issues and conservative candidates. Material policy matters. Language use, over and over, affects how citizens understand policy choices, which puts pressure on legislators and ultimately affects what policies are chosen. Language wars are policy wars. [my emphasis]

Tags: barack obama, social security, state of the union 2011

Obama's 2011 State of the Union address

First, the Social Security part:

To put us on solid ground, we should also find a bipartisan solution to strengthen Social Security for future generations. And we must do it without putting at risk current retirees, the most vulnerable, or people with disabilities; without slashing benefits for future generations; and without subjecting Americans' guaranteed retirement income to the whims of the stock market.

He's leaving the door open to adopting some of the recommendations of the Catfood Commission (or rather, by its members; the Commission itself didn't make an official report). The solution is easy: raise the cap on income taxed for SSDI (the Social Security payroll tax). We'll have to see what he comes up with. At least what he said didn't condemn the Democratic Party to electoral disaster for years to come.

But this also came in the section about his speech about his willingness to make deals with the Republicans to lower the non-problem of the deficit. The fight over Social Security isn't over.

The State of the Union (SOTU) address has become a pageant to the Imperial Presidency, far more spectacle than substance. In this very limited sense, I agree with cranky old George Will who was grumping on ABC's This Week on Sunday that the Supreme Court Justices shouldn't even attend. Here's the quote:

And it becomes a political pep rally, to use the phrase of Chief Justice Roberts last year. If it's going to be a pep rally, with the president's supporters or whatever party standing up and braying approval, and histrionic pouting on the part of the other, then it's no place for the judiciary, it's no place for the uniformed military, and it's no place for non-adolescent legislators.

Will's point seemed to be, though, that it was a partisan political event, which it's not. Since the Constitution requires Obama to deliver an annual message to Congress - though many Presidents did it in writing, not in person - it's an event where the President's multiple roles as head of state, head of government and head of his Party are all on display. Congress can hardly refuse a request by the President to address a Joint Session of Congress.

I also think the uniformed generals shouldn't be there. But not for Will's reason. Having them as official guests symbolically puts them on a level with the Cabinet, the Congress and the Supreme Court. In practice, they have far too much influence on democratic politics. But in our Constitutional system, they are not of equal importance to our system of government as the elected officials, the Cabinet and the Supreme Court. Leaving the uniformed generals out of the audience would reduce the Imperial trappings in a noticeable way.

On Obama's speech itself. My Austrian wife was not at all enchanted by this line, which for most listeners probably sounded like boilerplate:

And yet, as contentious and frustrating and messy as our democracy can sometimes be, I know there isn't a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth.

The Afghanistan War is looking up, the President tells us. That would be the war that has been supposedly going well since 2001, with no end yet in sight:

Thanks to our heroic troops and civilians, fewer Afghans are under the control of the insurgency. There will be tough fighting ahead, and the Afghan government will need to deliver better governance. But we are strengthening the capacity of the Afghan people and building an enduring partnership with them. This year, we will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead. And this July, we will begin to bring our troops home.

At least copy like this makes the job of speechwriters and Pentagon flacks easier. They can just look up copies of press releases from the Vietnam War on how well things are going and tweak a word here and there.

McClatchy's Nukes and Spooks 01/25/2011 blog Petraeus issues state of the Afghan war assessment, reporting what our glorious generals usually report, that they are doing a great job but the war must go on:

In a letter to the 100,000 U.S. forces, Petreaus said that over the last year, the U.S.-led counter-insurgency campaign had succeeded in halting "a downward security spiral in much of" Afghanistan and even reversed "it in some areas of great importance."

The blog post isn't signed, but the blog is a joint product of Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and Nancy Youssef, all three of whom were doing real and substantial reporting on the run-up to the Iraq War, when Judy Miller and Michael Gordon at the New York Times were facilitating the neocons' weapons-of-mass-destruction phony propaganda. They are old-fashioned. They think a news article should report on the news, and not just pass on quotes from our glorious generals. The post also tells us:

Of course, it was Petraeus who reported in September that senior Taliban leaders had reached out to President Hamid Karzai's government to discuss holding negotiations on a much-longed for political settlement of the war. The intelocutor, however, turned out to be an impostor and no apparent progress was made on starting negotiations. That wasn't mentioned in the general's letter.

Nor did it say that 2010 saw a massive increase in violence and the highest U.S. casualties - at least 499 dead and more than 5,100 wounded - since the 2001 U.S. invasion, nor that many experts believe that the U.S.-led offensives in the south prompted insurgents to move to previously unaffected areas of the country.

Civilian casualties also hit an all-time high in 2010, with more than three-quarters blamed on the Taliban and other insurgent groups. The United Nations charted a 20 percent increase - to at least 6,215 - in civilian casualties for the first 10 months of 2010 compared to the same period a year earlier. And adjacent areas of Pakistan, where U.S. drone attacks rose by more than 160 percent last year, remained sanctuaries for the Taliban and allied groups.

None of that was in Petraeus' assessment either.

On domestic issues, the five-year spending freeze makes no sense. It's pro-cyclical, tending to slow the economy during a recession/Depression, when what we need are aggressively counter-cyclical policies to generate immediate growth.

The spending freeze also plays to the Republicans' framing of economic issues, in which gubment programs except for the military are bad.

Noam Scheiber puts a hopeful spin on Obama's turn toward more business-friendly rhetoric in a piece published before the speech, SOTU Address: The Real Story of Obama and Corporate America The New Republic 01/25/2011. Short version: Obama has charmed the CEO's into thinking he's caved to them, but he really hasn't. Scheiber doesn't explain how this approach fits into Obama's cave-in on the tax deal last month.

We'll have to see, though, what substance may lie behind the competitiveness talk. Paul Krugman in The Competition Myth New York Times 01/23/2011 puts it this way:

In advance of the State of the Union, President Obama has telegraphed his main theme: competitiveness.

This may be smart politics. Arguably, Mr. Obama has enlisted an old cliché on behalf of a good cause, as a way to sell a much-needed increase in public investment to a public thoroughly indoctrinated in the view that government spending is a bad thing.

But let’s not kid ourselves: talking about "competitiveness" as a goal is fundamentally misleading. At best, it's a misdiagnosis of our problems. At worst, it could lead to policies based on the false idea that what's good for corporations is good for America.

And neither in terms of economic growth nor social justice does this sound like a good idea, from Obama's speech:

So tonight, I'm asking Democrats and Republicans to simplify the system. Get rid of the loopholes. Level the playing field. And use the savings to lower the corporate tax rate for the first time in 25 years – without adding to our deficit.

The lowering the corporate tax rate I can see Obama doing. Whether the "loopholes" will be closed, I'm not so sure.

Now, we'll have to see what the actual proposals are.

Tags: barack obama, social security, state of the union 2011

Waiting for the SOTU Tuesday evening

Our star pundits will be looking for what they consider the important things. Will Democrats and Republicans "cross the aisle" and sit with each other? Will the bold Maverick McCain make surprising facial expressions? Will Chief Justice Roberts pick his nose during the speech?

For some background on evaluating the substance, Dean Baker is one good source. in Peter Peterson’s Budget Ball SEPR 01/24/2011, he writes about the ideology of the billionaire anti-Social Security zealot: "According to some accounts, he is now the largest employer in the D.C. area after the Pentagon." He explains Peterson's view of federal debt and deficits:

In short, in Peterson's budget ball, we can't make any changes that might create any serious inconvenience for the rich and powerful. We can have some small cuts in defense and modest tax increases for the rich as window dressing, but what we are left with is a massive budget deficit and nothing but Social Security, Medicare, and other social programs left to cut.

Paul Krugman blogs about The War on Demand 01/24/2011, by which he means the astonishing consensus among so many Serious People that the basic lessons of the last century or so on counter-cyclical economic policy (both fiscal and monetary) should just be disregarded:

It's kind of shocking if you think about it. Here we have a huge, hard-won intellectual achievement, one that accounts very well for the world we actually see, and yet it's being thrown away because it doesn't go along with ideological preconceptions. Once that sort of thing starts, where does it stop? The next thing you know, the theory of evolution will get the same treatment. Oh, wait.

Seriously, though, this is truly sad — and dangerous. Demand-side understanding, in my view, played a big role in helping us avoid a full replay of the Great Depression; if enough people had shared that understanding, we might have avoided even the minor-league Depression we're going through. But willful ignorance is on the march — and the odds are that we'll handle the next crisis very badly.

"Militant ignorance" would also be a description for it.

Tags: barack obama, bush doctrine

Obama's own preview of Tuesday's SOTU

Like most prepared Obama speeches, it's high-minded with grand rhetoric. But painfully short of programmatic guidelines. And does virtually nothing to advance a distinctively Democratic framing of the issues of the days.

It doesn't mention cutting Social Security. But there's not defense of Social Security, either.

Tags: barack obama, state of the union 2011

The SOTU, Social Security and the future of the Democratic Party

Even McClatchy stoops to stenography sometimes. Margaret Talev and David Lightman do so in an article that reads almost like a White House press release about the upcoming SOTU on Tuesday, Obama's Tuesday speech to stress economy, civility McClatchy Newspapers 01/21/2011.

The main thing I'm watching for in Tuesday's speech is whether Obama endorses Social Security Phaseout. Which he of course won't call that, but rather "protecting its long-time viability" or something similar. But if he endorses an increase in the retirement age or lower cost-of-living adjustments for recipients or pretty much any of the proposals coming from anti-Social Security groups like his own Catfood Commission or Third Way (the corporate-oriented centrist group of which his new chief of staff William Daley was on the board), that will mean he's embraced Social Security Phaseout. Because apart from how damaging such proposals are in themselves, once a Democratic President leads an attack on Social Security, the political firewall that until not long ago made Social Security the so-called "third rail of American politics" will be gone.

The extent of the political effects of such a move by Obama are hard to guess. It's not hard to guess that it will hurt the Democrats. It will. But whether the political effect on them will be merely bad or catastrophic is hard to say right now. I suspect it will look more like the latter. The polling data are giving the Democrats a screaming warning about this, as Joan McCarter discusses in Progressive pollsters warn against Social Security cuts Daily Kos 01/20/2011. She characterizes it as "potential dire electoral consequences for Democrats should Social Security cuts happen on their watch."

She also quotes Dan Froomkin from Obama's Social Security Talk Is Turning Voters Off, Pollsters Say Huffington Post 01/19/2011, who summarizes, "the pollsters said that any Democrat seeking elected office in 2012 should be begging Obama not to say anything about Social Security cuts in his State of the Union address later this month."

And check out the fourth graphic in this report of a recent New York Times/CBS News poll on what kind of government spending people would prefer to see cut if something is going to be cut: Poll Responses on How to Cut the Deficit New York Times 01/20/2011.

It's a measure of the pitiful state of the Democratic Party that activist Democrats will be greatly relieved if the Democratic President this Tuesday refrains from demanding cuts in Social Security. No issue right now provides a more dramatic illustration of the very real gap between our political and media elites, on the one hand, and the large majority of the public, on the other. As Jerry Brown said in his gubernatorial inaugural speech this month, "Without the trust of the people, politics degenerates into mere spectacle; and democracy declines, leaving demagoguery and cynicism to fill the void."

The partisan effect of Obama proposing Social Security Phaseout would not primarily be a matter of how it's received by what our Pod Pundits call "the Left." Progressive activists will be able to identify ways in which Democrats are still better than Republicans, because they have a more pragmatic approach on South Ossetia, or they are willing to impose marginally greater restrictions on financial gambling by "too big to fail" megabanks, or whatever.

But many people, including many Democratic base voters, who are "lower-information" voters - i.e., they aren't hopeless political junkies - will be asking themselves, "If the Democrats aren't even willing to defend Social Security, what good are they?" And many of them will not be able to think of an answer to that question.

It's also important to understand that the politics of this aren't based on the kind of measurements along a scale of left to right to which our Pod Pundits and star reporters are addicted, with The Center being the bestest of all places. Nor entirely on rational calculations, which in any case are greatly limited by the sad state of our national press. The Republicans, whose Party has been pushing to phase out Social Security and Medicare, ran in 2010 as the defenders of Medicare! Their hook for this posture was the savings that the Obama Administration rightfully claimed in Medicare as a result of the adoption of health care reform. Health care reform didn't cut back Medicare eligibility. It's benefits are expected to produce a reduction in demand for Medicare services over time.

But the Republicans' claim that Obama cut Medicare, along with Sarah Palin's sleazy and dishonest "death panel" claim and other health care hysteria, have had a real effect in shifting older voters more into the Republican column, and that trend was clear in last year's elections. The shift of older voters more heavily toward the Republicans is a critically important factor in American political demographics right now.

And the Democrats did a poor job of spotlighting that Medicare claim as a falsehood in the 2010 campaign. So much so that it seems to be entering the category of "zombie lie" now, one that just won't die. David "Bobo" Brooks, whose expertise is delivering the Republican Party line in a compulsively calm tone, rolled it out on the PBS Newshour yesterday (Shields, Brooks on GOP's Repeal Effort, Obama's China Overtures), saying, " It is true that the Republicans have not decided -- have not asked for any painful stuff, like Medicare cuts, the way Obama to his credit did." (my emphasis) Actually, he didn't. But neither moderator Jim Lehrer nor Bobo's opposite ideological number Sleepy Mark Shields could be bothered to point that out.

So, not only will the Republicans be happy to facilitate Social Security Phaseout, because Wall Street would love to have that money still taken out of people's paychecks but put into "private savings" accounts that could be invested in stocks and managed by banks taking hefty cuts in fees. After they let Obama take the lead on cutting Social Security, they can campaign against him in 2012 for having cut Social Security!

Talev and Lightman inform us, "White House aides have declined to say which, if any, recommendations from his bipartisan deficit commission he'll put forward, or how he'd rein in spending on Medicare, Social Security or defense." (my emphasis)

They also report that the Third Way group, which favors Social Security Phaseout, is hoping that finally the Democrats can give up on all this social program crap and get down to the real business of comforting the very comfortable:

Jim Kessler is co-founder and vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic research group whose board recently included William Daley, Obama's new chief of staff. Kessler, whose group launched the idea of bipartisan seating at the speech, said: "I would love to hear him say that with the passage of health care, America's 85-year quest to construct a safety net is now complete and that America's major challenge going forward is long-term economic growth.

"It's important to shift the Democratic Party from one that's focused primarily on economic security to one that's focused primarily on economic growth." [my emphasis]

Tags: barack obama, social security, state of the union 2011

Anticipating the State of the Union address

The White House is pointing reporters toward his speech of December 6, 2010 in Winston-Salem as a prelude to his State of the Union (SOTU) address next Tuesday (Remarks by the President on the Economy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina Forsyth Technical Community College). It contains a lot of boosterism rhetoric about keeping the country competitive. And it uses the theme of "our generation's Sputnik moment", referring to the Cold War rallying moment when Soviet Russia seemed to be achieving superior scientific development to the US by launching the Sputnik satellite:

So 50 years later, our generation's Sputnik moment is back. This is our moment. If the recession has taught us anything, it’s that we cannot go back to an economy that's driven by too much spending, too much borrowing, running up credit cards, taking out a lot of home equity loans, paper profits that are built on financial speculation. We’ve got to rebuild on a new and stronger foundation for economic growth.

We need to do what America has always been known for: building, innovating, educating, making things. We don’t want to be a nation that simply buys and consumes products from other countries. We want to create and sell products all over the world that are stamped with three simple words: “Made In America.” That's our goal.

Being in a generally unenthusiastic mood at the moment, I'm going to grumpily observe that the inspiration of the original "Sputnik moment" gave us such dubious phenomena as the "missile gap", which turned out to a phony concern, but not before it gave a big boost to a lot of dubious military spending increases.

The best news is that Obama steered clear of any suggestion of phasing out Social Security, though he did include a reference to the pro-Phaseout Catfood Commission:

Now, I want to emphasize I say this knowing full well we face a very difficult fiscal situation. I'm looking at the books back in Washington, and folks weren't doing a real good job with their math for the last decade. (Applause.) So now that the threat of a depression has passed, and a recovery is beginning to take hold, reducing our long-term deficit has to be a priority. And in the long run, we won't be able to compete with countries like China if we keep borrowing from countries like China. (Applause.) We won't be able to do it. (Applause.)

So we've already started making some tough decisions. And they’re unpopular and people get mad, but we’ve got to make some decisions. I've proposed a three-year freeze in all spending that doesn't have to do with national security. And I proposed a two-year freeze in the pay for federal workers. That’s why we’re currently studying recommendations of the bipartisan deficit reduction panel that I commissioned. We're going to have to be bold and courageous in eliminating spending and programs that we don't need and we can't afford.

But here's where there's going to be a debate in Washington over the next year and over the next couple of years and maybe over the next five years, because I will argue and insist that we cannot cut back on those investments that have the biggest impact on our economic growth ... (applause.)

This expresses an over-optimistic view of the economy's health. And policies based on this general approach are likely to unnecessarily prolong the Great Recession.

Tags: barack obama, state of the union 2011, us economy