Barack Obama put on a deft performance Tuesday night. With trills of empathy, the president’s voice soared to hit the high notes. He easily carried a tune of economic populism. But after five years of Obama in the White House, Americans should know by now that he was lip-syncing the words.
The latest State of the Union speech offered a faint echo of a call for the bold public investment that would be necessary to reduce economic inequity in the United States. The rhetoric went out to a country that in recent years has grown even more accustomed to yesterday’s floor becoming today’s ceiling.
The speech offered nothing that could plausibly reverse the trend of widening income gaps. Despite Obama’s major drumroll about his executive order to increase the minimum wage for some federal contract employees, few workers would be affected. The thumping was loud, but the action was small.
Obama of course blames congressional Republicans for obstructing needed reforms — and they certainly deserve blame. But for Americans struggling to make ends meet, the record of the Obama administration is littered with wreckage from its refusal to fight for people of modest means.
During 2009 and 2010 — when Democrats controlled not only the White House and Senate but also the House — Obama skipped past vital options for working and want-to-be-working Americans. For instance, he never really pushed for the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have helped unions regain footing and halt their downward slide of membership, especially after crackdowns in state legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere.
In a huge blow to the largest unionized workforce in the country — U.S. Postal Service employees — the Obama administration did nothing to undo the extreme pension-prefunding rules that were imposed during the last two years of the George W. Bush administration. And now the Obama White House is presiding over waves of privatization of USPS assets and services, with grave consequences for its workers and the public.
In his speech, while Obama presented himself as an ally of federal workers, he neglected to mention something quite relevant: At the end of 2010, he signed a bill that prohibited pay increases for most of the federal government’s civilian employees. The pay freeze had come at his initiative.
More broadly, Obama never came close to embracing the scale of public investment that would have been necessary to truly move toward a strong and equitable economy.