What I didn’t hear in the State of the Union speech, and why

Victor Landa, NewsTaco

More than any other speech that President Obama has delivered, last nights’ State of the Union was done more for himself than for any audience, real or perceived.

He did it because he has to, because every President since Woodrow Wilson has read the State of the Union in person to a joint session of congress, and every president since Harry Truman has done it live on national television. And every president has had a specific set of goals in mind, woven into their account of the overall condition of the union.

Obama didn’t do that last night, and depending on whether you’re progressive or conservative you found the speech lacking in different ways.

Progressives like bold initiatives, they like brick and mortar stuff, big goals and plans. Conservatives are more inclined to abstract visions, like freedom, small government and patriotism. So if you’re a liberal and were expecting specific marching orders and grand plans, you didn’t get them. And if you’re conservative you heard a large-picture view of things, but not necessarily the view you wanted to hear.

What I heard last night sounded like the ruminations of a man setting off on the last leg of a long journey; it sounded like his goal was to cut through the moment’s political rhetoric with the intent to set the record straight. It wasn’t conciliatory, I don’t think it was ment to be. He spoke of a desire to breach the vast, corrosive partisan divide and he invoked president’s Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt as his examples. But Lincoln united the country through war, and Roosevelt presided over a partisan split not unlike the present. The bully pulpit serves to issue a call to action, but it’s never worked to placate fear and distrust.

He spoke as if at this point in his presidency a laundry list of programs is futile – the opposing side of the partisan divide has been adamant in their resistance to his ideas for seven years.

And yet, I liked the speech.

I like how the president invoked large-picture ideals without resorting to easy tropes like freedom and patriotism. I like how he kept away from the meaningless bluster of initiatives and programs that only serve as a battle ground for partisan skirmishes. I like how he spoke of the ideas that sit at the place where the initiatives and the vision are generated. It was almost like a civics teacher giving his class a set of governing prompts.

And at the same time, I didn’t like it.

I wanted to hear in his words, not Jeh Johnson’s, why his administration has been rounding-up immigrant families in the dark of night. I wanted to hear him say that the round-ups would stop. I wanted to hear how, specifically, he proposed to make community college free to all students.  I wanted to know that he understood that the jobless rate among Latinos is 6.3 percent, while Latino entrepreneurship leads small business start-ups, and how those Latino small-business have a difficult time securing business loans. I wanted to hear him say that he’s aware of the dismal education performance in the Latino community, but more than that, I wanted to hear him say that blaming the culture and the student diminishes America and shortchanges the nation’s future. I wanted him to ascknolwdge that Latinos prize homeownership as much as any American, moreso even, but the path to getting a mortgage and owning a home is steep for them. And I wanted him to tell the nation that the reason Latinos are thriving is becasue of a sense of community, becasue of intelligence, hard work and dogged resourcefullness.

But I didn’t hear that, so it fell short of my specific expectations.

I uderstand what he was doing, though, so I’ll turn my ear to the folks who are vying to succeed him and I’ll measure my expectations against what they have to say. And I’ll let the bickering and the hair-splitting over his words to others – there’s work to be done.