Barack Obama's State of the Union
I’m a political blogger, but I’m not a political political blogger, if you know what I’m saying.Today I try to avoid analyzing politics from a conventional angle — who’s up, who’s down, whether a debate or speech will cause poll numbers to move up or down, etc.
That’s because it’s not what I do best. I can do it. It’s fun for me. I read a lot of political news, probably too much. But I’ll never be a really very good political pundit. I’ll never be a talking head on TV or a leading political blogger. That’s not me, and I won’t put energy into writing blog posts which just rehash the same basic points tens of thousands of other opinion-writers are talking about.
I’ve come to agree with Steve McIntosh who believes that developing and advancing the Integral worldview is the most important form of political activism today. That’s why one of the most important questions I ask of a political speech is: does this help make the world a more integral, holistic, worldcentric place?
And by that measure, president Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech was almost a stunning success. His tone was largely conciliatory, nuanced, balanced, and targeted for the independent voters at the political center. For instance, he talked about boosting and re-organizing job training programs and making unemployment a re-employment program, bridging the political divide by creating a framework for appealing to conservatives who oppose the welfare state and progressives who would like to see more overall spending going to the unemployed.
I do have criticisms. Unfortunately, in Obama’s speech, he mentions the word “gay” only once, in the context of the gay issue that gets some of the highest public approval rankings:
Those of us who’ve been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops. When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one Nation, leaving no one behind.
This is hardly a courageous moment for this president who once promised to be a “fierce advocate” of gay rights. Not much love for his LGBT political base.
His policy prescriptions did throw some red meat to his progressive base, but nobody really believes he can get his juiciest measures (including a repeal of DOMA) through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. Whatever the merits of the Buffet Rule (millionaire tax) or ending tax subsidies for companies that ship jobs overseas, these measures are virtually dead on arrival.
These ideas have little chance of getting passed unless Obama can sway public opinion in a way that gets them to elect more Democrats or pressure Republicans to cede ground. Some of the ideas — like paying down the debt by raising taxes on the rich or pulling back troops from Afghanistan — already enjoy much bipartisan support. But the crucial independent voters don’t seem to be translating their support for Obama’s policies into votes.
That’s why I wish even more of Obama’s speech had been spent on building support for an integral, bipartisan, pragmatic approach to politics — not just on policy specifics, but on the level of ideology. There is a strong integral case to be made today that Washington politics is broken; its dysfunctions can only be addressed by changing the negative, hostile attitudes many Americans have towards government and its ability to have a positive role in our lives.
This speech was a missed opportunity to shift attitudes towards collective actions towards much needed progressive reforms. Obama mentioned government 18 different times, but most of his references were ambivalent or negative.
For example, he said:
We shouldn’t just give our people a government that’s more affordable. We should give them a government that’s more competent and more efficient. We can’t win the future with a government of the past. (Applause.)
An exception to his tendency to criticize government is this quote, almost:
In the coming year, we’ll also work to rebuild people’s faith in the institution of government. Because you deserve to know exactly how and where your tax dollars are being spent, you’ll be able to go to a website and get that information for the very first time in history.
Even here Obama says that the way to rebuild people’s faith in government is to improve transparency. Maybe. That could help, I think. But it is still a meme that reinforces the view that government is the problem not the solution. It implies that the problem is with government, not with the peoples’ attitude towards government or a combination of both.
In the future, I hope Obama and his speechwriters will spend time actually defending the institution of government and announcing plans to get the government more involved in telling people what about the positive things it’s doing. And I hope he becomes the sort of “fierce advocate” of gay rights that he once promised to be — by converting to support gay marriage and then talking about his conversion as one that millions of Americans have made and can yet make.
We live in a world where 39% of Americans don’t know that Medicare is a government program and want the big bad government to stay out of Medicare. They want, as The New York Times says, for government to get its dirty hands off government programs. That’s pathetic. That’s ignorant. That is probably — as we integralists argue — partly a function of the level of development of their structure of consciousness (e.g., blue meme opposed to orange, green, or yellow in Spiral Dynamics terms). All of these things are within our power to change as individuals and as a society.
We live in an America that is divided about equally between supporters and foes of gay marriage. Obama has missed the opportunity to focus the public’s attention to the fact that really the debate isn’t about marriage. It’s about the role of government in granting civil recognition to marriages performed by public and private officiants. And it’s about the evolution of the public’s views of this role of government, seeing it as more limited and more positive at the same time. And any time the public begins to acknowledge the evolution of political ideals, they are becoming more integrally minded.
I hope the government creates a new generation of public service ads (PSAs) that educate Americans that government is very often the good guy…and requires media that use public airwaves to run them. I want to see newsletters — e-newsletters for everyone with an Internet connection — from government agencies. Sure these measures cost a little bit of money, but the long-term investment in the public’s support of government could make it a great investment.
People who hate government have been known on occasion to blow up federal buildings and such. They may not want to pay taxes or serve in the military. What’s more, such public relations efforts can probably be achieved just with the executive branch, requiring no cooperation from a dysfunctional Congress. Let’s do it.
I hope the federal government shifts its rhetoric from merely denouncing inefficient regulations into explaining that our economy is not strictly capitalist and never has been — it’s a cooperative endeavor between the public and private sector, and that’s the way it works best. And then leaders ought to paint ideological opponents who think otherwise as acting to tear America down instead of building us up.
That’s probably the most fundamental shift that needs to take place in our political culture, and it’s a profoundly integral response. It would not only shift our culture horizontally to allow incremental benefits, but create longer lasting ideological shift on a vertical level. In other words, by building the public support necessary for the best parts of the progressive agenda we can help raise the consciousness of the country more into the center-left territory. Let’s hope Obama doesn’t keep missing this key opportunity.
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