President Barack Obama delivers his first State of the Union speech this evening, Bay Area residents and activists across the political spectrum have a wide array of hopes for what he’ll say.
Local progressives might hope for inspirational words on the president’s unfulfilled push for health care reform, or for a signal that he’s ready to act on his promises to end the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy; to close the terrorism suspect prison at Guantanamo Bay; to eliminate tax breaks for oil companies; and so on.
Meanwhile, local conservatives might say what Obama has done — a $787 billion economic stimulus package; a more multilateral foreign policy; the “Cash for Clunkers” car buyback program; appointing Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court, and more — as well as his health care hopes are putting the nation at risk, and fueling what they hope will be a Republican revolution in November’s midterm congressional elections.
“If you care about the Constitution and the fundamental principles on which this country was founded, in some ways it’s almost a blessing in disguise that Obama won because he has overplayed his hand, he pushed too hard, too fast and all of a sudden people are going, ‘Whoa, slow down,’ ” said Mimi Steel, of Castro Valley, organizer of the Glenn Beck-inspired San Francisco Bay 912 Project.
“I
think that what he needs to say is something that isn’t even within his realm of experience,” she said. “What he needs to say is that we need to get the economy going and the way to get the economy going is that government’s going to get out of your way, and I don’t think he would say that in a million years.”
Instead of calling for far-reaching tax cuts, he’s likely to give an FDR-style “what the government is going to do for you” speech, Steel predicted, and will keep pursuing his agenda by promising congressional Democrats that they can survive any potential conservative backlash.
James Kahn, a UC San Francisco health-policy professor and president of the California Physicians Alliance, might welcome such aggressiveness. He hopes the president will move off his incremental, compromise approach to health care reform. “He’s gained very little at the center of the political spectrum, and what he’s lost, I think, is establishing a target that’s where he is, which is on the more progressive side.
“He’s never really said, ‘The best system is single-payer “… and let’s keep that as the target,’ ” Kahn said. “I would love for him to say that now.”
He hopes the president will note that other industrialized nations have controlled costs and improved care quality through single-payer systems, and will vow that “‘we can no longer ignore their example. I will lead the country to learn from what our colleagues, other countries with similar economies learned long ago.'”
Instead, Kahn predicts “an 80 percent probability he’ll criticize the insurance companies, and I encourage that. “… He will emphasize his resolve, he will emphasize the magnitude of the change we are talking about” in health care — even if that change isn’t what either Kahn or Obama truly wants.
Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn hopes “to see the president commit that he meant it when he said it’s time to return to the rule of law in this country.”
From warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens to detention, treatment and extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects, Cohn said, Obama’s Justice Department has “enthusiastically embraced and extended most of the broad claims of executive power, which, when the Bush administration made them, he and most of the people now in his administration were up in arms against.”
“It’s not just that this is a promise he hasn’t gotten to yet,” she said. “It’s not like we’re in a holding pattern, that’s not what’s going on — these cases are being dismissed at the insistence of the Obama administration. And that’s embracing the positions of your predecessor.”
“What we’d like to hear the president say, of course, is that he has a plan to increase peace and social justice across the spectrum,” said Mary Alice O’Connor, executive director of Walnut Creek’s Mt. Diablo Peace and Justice Center.
The center this month released a statement opposing Obama’s plan to send more troops to Afghanistan.
O’Connor said her center’s board and members also hope to hear Obama respond to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision lifting limits on corporate and union spending for or against federal election candidates. And “I’d like to hear some praise for the troops in Haiti, I think we’ve done a monumental job,” she added. “It’s a time for us to feel really proud of them.”
Oakland attorney Meredith Brown went to the 2008 Democratic National Convention as a Hillary Rodham Clinton delegate and left as a Barack Obama supporter. Now, she hopes to hear him communicate and empathize from the House’s podium as he did on the campaign trail.
“I hope he will say that he understands the primary issue that is facing Americans right now is jobs and the economy, that he understands we inherited a (downward) spiraling economy and that he has a plan that will bring this country back to domestic stability,” she said. “He’s got to tell everyone he gets it, that he’s not missing a thing.”
Some people voted for Obama hoping he would reform health care, or end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for other reasons, Brown said, but anyone who has lost a job wants to hear about that first and foremost now. He should take a page from Bill Clinton’s “it’s the economy, stupid” and “I feel your pain” playbooks, she said.
Berkeley High School student Sasha Batz-Stern, 14, spent Election Night 2008 at an Obama campaign office, calling Iowa residents to get out the vote. She takes — and wants Obama and the rest of the nation to take — a longer view.
“I hope that he’ll say that he has done things to set the stage for more things,” she said this week. “He’s under a lot of pressure — very high expectations. A lot of people thought everything would’ve changed by now, that he would have accomplished all the goals he’d set. He hasn’t, but he has the potential to achieve all those goals.”
Sasha hopes Obama will call tonight for swift action against climate change and poverty here and abroad, as well as in favor of gay rights, including marriage equality.
“There’s a lot of people who were so tired of the Bush administration and thought anyone would be better, and then thought Obama would be so much better that he would accomplish more in his first year than any other president could in eight years,” she said. “But I think that he has given a lot of hope to people, even if they’re disappointed he hasn’t delivered it all yet.”
