Obama Dares GOP to Help the Middle Class in His State of the Union

[DonViejo]

Michael Tomasky

The public is open to sharing prosperity now that the economy is finally chugging. Meanwhile, the Republican fear campaign is running out of steam.

Can you remember a time when the political zeitgeist has ping-ponged the way ours has in just two months? The day after last November’s election, Barack Obama was finished. Now, two positive jobs reports and a 60-odd-cent-per-gallon drop in gasoline prices later, he’s the president again. And the Republicans have just taken power and have run Congress for only two weeks, but suddenly they’re kind of on the defensive.

Of course this isn’t to say that Obama is going to get a single plank of the ambitious agenda he laid out in the State of the Union Address through Congress. The Republicans still hold those cards.

But what’s happened in the last couple of months, and what Obama seized effectively with this speech, is this. The mood has changed. The public is open to ideas it wasn’t open to a year ago; even two months ago.

Politics in this country is really about only one thing at a time, and that one thing favors one party or the other. In 1981 and for a few years thereafter, it was about how oppressive the federal government was. Advantage Republicans. For a short time in the late 1980s, it was about how we’d vanquished the Soviet Union (and won a little side war). Advantage Republicans.

For a while in the 1990s, it was about building a future-oriented economy. Advantage Democrats. After 9/11, it was about security. Advantage Republicans. And so on. It’s a little more complicated than this, because thrown into these cycles we have the scandals and the social changes that all have some impact on how people think about things, but basically, this is how American politics rolls: We go through these eras, and the eras make the majority of people decide that one party or the other is better equipped to do something about the challenges.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/20/obama-shifts-the-focus-to-sharing-prosperity-in-his-state-of-the-union-address.html

[DetlefK]

1. Election 2008: At the beginning it was about national security and McCain was about to win.

Then the recession happened and all of a sudden the most important topic of the election was the economy. And people wanted not-Bush to take care of the economy.