DONALD LAMBRO: Obama’s last State of the Union

OPINION:

President Obama’s last State of the Union address to the nation was filled with regrets and disappointments that he hadn’t been able to sell his liberal agenda to the American people.

He came into office hoping to unite the country behind his presidency and policies, but admitted that the country was far more bitterly divided than when he took office.

“It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better,” he complained. He rode into office on a hope and a prayer that he would end a steep recession, quickly put the unemployed back to work, end the terrorist war in the Middle East and improve the lives of all Americans.

But the recession persisted, despite a $1 trillion make work jobs program, patterned after FDR’s New Deal plan. The labor force shrank as millions stopped looking for a job, and thus were no longer counted as unemployed — lowering the jobless rate.

Mr. Obama’s job approval polls sank and even today can’t break out of the mid-40s range. Economists said it was easily the longest recession and recovery since the Great Depression in the 1930s that lasted a decade.

As for the terrorist threat he inherited, its grown stronger and far more deadly in a renewed blood-soaked rampageacross the Middle East, into North Africa, with occasional forays in Europe, and, more recently, in the U.S.

He ran for a second term in 2012, boasting in every speech that the ranks of al Qaeda’s leadership had been “decimated” and the terrorists were “on the run.” But he had little to say why they were now in control of large swaths of territory in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The last year of his presidency isn’t shaping up to be any better. Economic forecasters say that fourth quarter GDP growth has fallen into the 1 percent range or lower.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that 7,000 more Americans filed for weekly unemployment benefit claims for the week ending Jan. 9.

At the same time, the stock market has been falling like a rock, with the Dow Jones industrial average dropping by triple digits Wednesday — down by more than 7 percent since the year began.

“People need something that’s going to give them some confidence, and they haven’t really seen it so far in 2016,” said JJ Kinahan, chief strategist for TD Ameritrade.

The word that we heard most frequently from business people throughout the Obama years was “uncertainty.”

That prevented business investors from taking risks to spur faster economic growth, start new enterprises, and create new employment opportunities.

The answer Mr. Obama and the Democrats have for just about every economic or social problem is to raise taxes. That kept risk capital locked up as the U.S. economy languished in what the administration called the “new normal.”

The Washington Post said Mr. Obama’s speech “was primarily a discourse on the State of America’s politics, a theme he’s hit in virtually all of his past addresses.”

“I will not give up on trying to change the tone of our politics, ” Mr. Obama said in his first State of the Union speech.

The issues that Democrats and Republicans have battled over the past seven years are not about politics, but about policy. What works and what won’t.

On economic matters, Ronald Reagan and his advisers went back to the 1960s and President Kennedy’s across-the-board tax cuts. JFK did not live to see the results of his plan, but it not only got America “moving again” as the economy picked up, it increased revenue to balance the budget by the end of that decade.

The fiery tax cut debate in Congress was hot and heavy as Democrats accused Mr. Reagan of enriching his friends on Wall Street and in Hollywood.

“What we have today is a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich,” said former Vice President Walter Mondale. [President Reagan] gave each of his rich friends enough tax relief to buy a Rolls Royce — and he asked your family to pay for the hubcaps.”

However, unlike Mr. Obama, Mr. Reagan didn’t complain about the “political tone” of his opponents, but appealed to what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature.”

“An opportunity society awaits us. We need only believe in ourselves and give men and women of faith, courage, and vision the freedom to build it,” he said.

Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts ended Jimmy Carter’s recession in two years, unemployment fell, his polls shot up, and he went on to beat Walter Mondale in 49 states.

Go back and listen to Mr. Obama’s address and you will hear the message of a beaten man, talking about how difficult it was fighting for change, and calling for “a better politics.”

“What I’m asking for is hard,” he said. At another point, he wished that if he had the “gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt” he “might have better bridged the [political] divide” that blocked so much of his far-left agenda.

He had hoped he would strengthen his party and open a new, historic era of ultra-liberal big government, and, like Mr. Reagan, go down in history as a transformative president.

Instead, under his presidency, he had lost Democratic control of the House and Senate, and the bulk of the nation’s governorships and state legislatures.

The rough and tumble of American politics has always been a critical characteristic of our government by which free Americans have given voice to their grievances.

In little more than a year, Mr. Obama will be out of office, a historic figure in his own right as the first black president, but who learned the hard way that America still remains a center-right country.

• Donald Lambro is a syndicated columnist and contributor to The Washington Times.