If you watched the State of the Union on Tuesday night, you would have seen a glimmer of 2008’s optimistic and cool Sen. Barack Obama mixed with 2014’s tired, greying and almost out-of-hope President Obama, who wants — or at least should want — to regain his popularity, credibility and ability to lead the nation forward.
The president spoke as if he had learned a lot about Washington since taking office in 2009. When he campaigned to “change” politics as usual in our nation’s broken capital, I wonder if he thought it’d be easy.
Because it clearly hasn’t been.
And part of me wonders if Obama is even still thinking about fighting that battle. If he’s smart, and he obviously is, the goal should be on the farthest of back burners. Because he’s got three years left — most of which stand the chance to be lost to lame-duck status — and if Obama wants a Democrat in the White House when he leaves, he’ll need to do something besides battling with Tea Party Republicans to no avail.
The ones who have stood in the way of Obama’s legislative overhauls and legislative initiatives — like gun control and immigration reform — won’t be going away before his term is up. He’s got to live with them.
But maybe he doesn’t have to work with them. That sounded like it was Obama’s mentality when he said he’d start looking at more executive actions he can take without Congress’ approval.
That should have sounded like good news for those who like the president’s policies but think he’s a shoddy leader.
Something Obama might want to be mindful of, though, is 2016, when a Republican very well could be elected to pick up where he’d be leaving off. I doubt any Democrat would be happy if a Republican president said he or she would be looking to executive actions when finding common ground with legislators proved too tough. And it’d be easy for Republicans to retake the White House and say, “Well, Obama did it.”
In 2014, Obama and Congress should work together to focus on education, immigration and tax reforms, as well as some fine-tuning of the president’s imperfect health care law. Doing so would send a strong message to the American people that Washington is thinking about us, not a specific political party’s standing.
Predictions for the year: immigration reform will happen (but it won’t be in the same form as what passed in the Senate), the GOP will let the debt ceiling go up with no strings attached and Obama will end the year with many foreign policy wins in Iran, Syria and Afghanistan.
Joshua Jamerson is a junior studying journalism and local editor at The Post. What do you think Obama and Congress should focus on in 2014? Talk politics with him at jj360410@ohiou.edu.
