Members cast as foils, if not spoilers, in Obama’s speech

By DAVID HAWKINGS

CQ-Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON

“Please don’t get in the way” is one way of synthesizing Tuesday night’s message to Congress from President Barack Obama.

On many of the big things that matter most, he asserted, he’s positioned to leave the country in much better shape than how he found it and how his would-be Republican successors describe it – tacitly urging the Hill’s GOP to resist legislative gamesmanship that while playing into presidential politics might crimp the hopeful trajectory of his final year.

Obama made clear he believes putting a Democrat in the White House this fall is the best way to sustain a justifiably sunny view of his stewardship, marked by economic salvation at home and a strong hand improving balky stability abroad.

The point wasn’t to be discourteous to the GOP leaders who technically invited him to the Capitol to provide his final version of the State of the Union. But from the start, Obama made clear he was less interested in winning over his in-person audience than ever before.

Instead, he aimed his pitch almost entirely over the lawmakers’ heads and toward what was likely the last national television audience he ever commands. Senators and House members were relegated by the rhetoric mainly to playing the foil, leaving many Republicans grumbling that for all his lofty talk about an optimistic future Obama was captive to his hectoring impulses until the end.

“The American people should know that with or without congressional action,” he said after a reiterating his so-far-ignored request for an Authorization for Use of Military Force against the Islamic State, he retains the power to continue his 16-month military campaign indefinitely. “It may take time, but we have long memories, and our reach has no limit,” he said.

“The future we want – opportunity and security for our families, a rising standard of living and a sustainable, peaceful planet for our kids – all that is within our reach,” he told the lawmakers at the address’s climax. “But it will only happen if we work together. It will only happen if we can have rational, constructive debates.”

In a significant departure from the formula for modern State of the Union presentations, Obama made short shrift of his near-term desires and posed “four big questions” – and detailed answers – about the broadest and biggest challenges he sees in a rapidly changing U.S. during the decade after he’s gone from the scene. What more should government do to provide an economic “fair shot” to the middle class? How can technological innovation best be harnessed next? How can America lead on the global stage without playing the role of the world’s policeman?

Most pointedly, he asked, “How can we make our politics reflect what’s best in us, and not what’s worst?”

Obama did not explicitly hold his robust assertions of executive power or his minimalist style of legislative courtship accountable. But neither did he name-check any of his most vituperative Republican critics, either in Congress during the past seven years or on the presidential trail now.

Instead, he hoped for a future where bottomless buckets of unregulated money no longer fuel campaigns, redrawn congressional maps put more House seats within reach and turnout is boosted by modernized and easier voting systems.