FirstAlert: State of the Union Wrap Up

By Christi Parsons and Janet Hook
Tribune Washington Bureau
(MCT)
WASHINGTON — Fighting to regain his political footing, President Barack Obama on Wednesday thrust job creation to the top of his agenda even as he offered a feisty defense of the stalled agenda that has consumed his first year in office, including his health care initiative, climate change legislation and new restrictions on banks.
The president, in his first State of the Union address, pledged compassion for people struggling in the nation’s sour economy and dedication to the cause of assisting them.
“The worst of the storm has passed,” Obama said of the financial sector meltdown that helped bring on a deep recession and double-digit unemployment. “But the devastation remains.” He said that “jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010″ and called for new spending to promote jobs growth.
Obama enumerated a host of challenges but focused solidly on joblessness and the national economy. The prescriptions he offered were not dramatically different than those he offered almost a year ago when he first addressed lawmakers as the newly elected president, as he called for investing in small business, green jobs and clean energy. He promised to spur the export of American products, crack down on Wall Street excess and enact fiscal reform that targets debt and deficits.
But while the words were similar, the context was radically changed.
Last year he talked about moving forward with progressive policies on a scale akin to that of Franklin Roosevelt. On Wednesday, he spoke as a politician battered for a year by opponents and his signature health care effort in jeopardy after a stunning loss of the Democratic Senate seat in the blue state of Massachusetts. Party leaders are scrambling to stop the stampede of Democratic Congress members considering a new line of work.
The ideas he outlined were still big — fighting global warming, fixing immigration policy and making long-term investments in economic growth — but the solutions were fine-pointed. He peppered his speech with demands for change in the Washington playbook, for instance, and then called on lawmakers to establish a single Web site for disclosing all the special-funding requests before they come to a vote.
That information is already posted on the Web, but Obama wants it all in one place.
To boost the economy, Obama proposed taking $30 billion of the money Wall Street banks have repaid from their bailouts and using it to help community banks give credit to small business.
He announced funding to begin a new nationwide high-speed rail system and urged the Senate to pass a financial reform package. He called for an end to tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and said the money should go to reward those who do otherwise. His budget, due on Monday, will include new investments in technology to diversify energy sources and reduce dependence on foreign oil.
Obama also touted his plan to help middle class families by doubling the child-care tax credit. Vowing that the federal government would tighten its belt, too, Obama pledged to freeze discretionary spending on non-security items amounting to about an eighth of the federal budget.
Still, even experts with an affinity for his views suggested that Obama’s plans were small-bore.
“I wouldn’t say the economic challenges have changed much,” said Dean Baker, an economist at the progressive Center for Economic and Policy Research. “What has changed is the ambitions. The big ambitions are gone.”
A new edge to the Obama persona was evident, however, as when he admonished Republican leadership that, if they vote as a group against every piece of business before the Senate, “the responsibility to govern is now yours, as well.”
At several points, Obama seemed like a beleaguered, misunderstood president struggling to explain himself — a surprising tone to strike for a young leader who stood on the podium a year ago with soaring popularity and deep reservoirs of good will.
Obama spent a lot of time in the speech “setting the record straight’ by saying he had cut taxes and that the budget deficit that had been built up “before I even walked in the door.”
He said he was forced by events to support a bank bailout.
“If there’s one thing that has unified Democrats and Republicans, it’s that we all hated the bank bailout. I hated it. You hated it. It was about as popular as a root canal,” the president said to laughter.
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Jim Tankersley and Kim Geiger contributed to this report from Washington.
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(c) 2010, Tribune Co.

Videos from the Nation’s Capitol – KHS Students sounds off

View all the latest videos from the Kickapoo High School Journalism Department’s trip to Washington D.C. We will continue to post more videos as they become available.