There will be more prose, less poetry, though President Obama will certainly highlight the themes of his Inaugural Address and his earlier poetic speeches. He will be specific about policy: on immigration, gun violence, climate change, military expenditures and reforms, and the need for a balanced approach to immediate and long-term economic challenges. He will hang tough on the sequestration, calling the Republicans’ bluff, and he will warn of the dangers the U.S. faces abroad, while he defends his foreign policy, including his major accomplishment of ending two disastrous wars (though he won’t call them that). The speech is going to be about jobs and the middle class. This is all expected by the chattering class, and I think Obama will meet expectations. But I also think that there will be more interesting things going on. The President will move forcefully ahead on his major project, moving the center left on issues foreign and domestic. And there are significant signs he is succeeding, see this report from a deep red state.

Look for an opening to Republican moderates. I suspect Obama will not only stake out his positions, but also point to the way that those holding other positions may work with him on contentious issues. This will be most apparent in immigration reform. He will also likely address Republicans concerns about long-term cuts in government spending.

He will highlight the need for a leaner, but as mean, military budget, as he denounces the dangers of the thoughtless cuts in military spending via the sequester. Real cuts in military spending will please his base, including me, but also some more libertarian Republicans, Rand Paul, though not John McCain.

Less pleasing for progressives would be what Obama very well may say about so-called “entitlements.” I am not sure he will do this now, but if not now, when?

He could make clear his priority – control medical and Medicare expenses, reminding us that this is a task of Obamacare, but he also may make gestures suggesting more Republican friendly solutions concerning intelligent cutting of expenditures: on indexing and eligibility issues for Medicare and perhaps also Social Security. He is unlikely to be specific. He will emphasize that these programs are essential. Yet, he could strategically reveal an openness to Republican ideas, as he emphasizes the need for bi-partisan support of infrastructure, education, research and development, meeting the economic and environmental challenges of the day. This would be an invitation to moderate Republicans to break away from the “party of no.”

Obama’s recent legislative victories included Republican votes on the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling. I believe he will talk about the economy in such a way that he strengthens his capacity to draw upon this new governing coalition. He will do it in the name of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class. This is the formulation of Obama for ordinary folk, the popular classes, the great bulk of the demos, the people. In this speech and in others, they are the subjects of change, echoing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: government of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, by the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, for the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class. (More on this on another day.)

Obama will declare the state of the Union as fundamentally sound and improving. He will underscore the contingencies of the improvement. He will speak to the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, but also to the members of Congress.  Speaking to the Congress, he will draw upon the themes of his re-election campaign and his recent speeches on gun violence and immigration. With public support, he will call on Congress to act, and he will suggest the path. He will speak in the name of those who voted for him, but will reach out to the representatives of those who didn’t to find common cause on key crucial issues. He will voice his fundamental commitments and suggest compromise. It will be interesting to see how he will balance these.

I think Obama’s constancy is the most remarkable aspect of his presidency. Tactics have changed, as he has worked with a Democratic majority in Congress, with a Republican dominated Congress, and against a Republican dominated Congress. But his goals have not changed, most clearly summarized, in my judgment, in two key speeches. The one that made him a national figure: his keynote address to the Democratic Convention in 2004 (and the many speeches that followed repeated its inclusive themes) and his recent Inaugural Address, which most clearly and compactly articulates his progressive aspirations. He is a centrist who wants to include into public debate the experiences and aspirations of the American people in its diversity, including the diversity of opinion: progressive, conservative and moderate. But he has his specific commitments, and he wants those commitments, most sharply revealed in the Inaugural Address, to be at the center of the debate. Expect a State of the Union that links these two speeches, pointing to specific actions, and, therefore, pushing forward the Obama transformation.

Last night in his State of the Union address, President Obama revealed his fundamental approach to governing: centrist in orientation, pragmatic in his approach to the relationship between capitalism and the state, mindful of the long term need to address the problem of spending deficits, yet, still committed to social justice – “But let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.” (link) As I have put it before, a centrist committed to transforming the center.

The speech was finely written and delivered, tactically and strategically formed to appear post partisan, while putting his Republican opposition on the defensive.   As I understand his project, it was a continuation of the course he set during his campaign and has been following during his Presidency, despite the fact that many observers claim that he is now shifting to the center (if they like what has happened recently) or to the right (those on the left who see betrayal).

The contrast with the Republican response, delivered by Paul Ryan, could not have been greater.  He spoke in an empty House Budget Committee meeting room bereft of notables and dignitaries, without ceremony.  But he forcefully argued for significant budget cuts and warned of an impending crisis, being pretty effective under difficult conditions.

“We are at a moment, where if government’s growth is left unchecked and unchallenged, America’s best century will be considered our past century. This is a future in which we will transform our social safety net into a hammock, which lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency…  Speaking candidly, as one citizen to another: We still have time… but not much time.”

His central principled position which he developed extensively:

“We believe, as our founders did, that the pursuit of happiness depends on individual liberty, and individual liberty requires limited government.”  (link)

The virtue of limited government and a balanced budget through cuts in government programs was his major theme.

And then there was the weirdest speech of the evening.  Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Response. Looking in the wrong direction, spouting questionable statistics and referring to misleading charts, blaming President Obama for all the country’s woes, with odd associational declarations –

“The President could also turn back some of the 132 regulations put in place in the last two years, many of which will cost our economy $100 million or more.”

Is it that each cost $100 million or more?

“For two years President Obama made promises just like the ones we heard him make tonight. Yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing.”

The cost of gasoline?

“Last November you went to the polls and voted out big-spending politicians and you put in their place men and women with a commitment to follow the Constitution and cut the size of government.”

Commitment to the constitution equals cutting the size of government?  What would Hamilton say about that, or for that matter Lincoln?

The End of Ideology?

Obama gave a civil speech about the problems of the day, reaching out to all people of good to come to the aid of their country (not their party), promising to use the government to improve education, invest in infrastructure, justly solve the problem of immigration, and facilitate entrepreneurship.

Bachmann’s speech provided comic relief, but certainly must have annoyed committed Republicans.

Ryan’s for me was most interesting.  Striking was how much of what he had to say was a matter of deduction, stating truths about history, and deducing from these truths proper public policy.  Happiness is a function of individual liberty, which requires limited government, which means that there must be the cutting of government programs (and by the way also, but not mentioned, the cutting of taxes).  And he is absolutely certain that the government cannot positively act to create economic innovation and development.  Or as he put it, “Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness and wise consumer choices has never worked, and it won’t work now.”

Certainly not bureaucracy (never a good thing), but what about the precedents that the President referred to in his speech?   As he argued for investments in education, infrastructure and renewable energy, he remembered past great achievements that involved government support.

“America is the nation that built the transcontinental railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the Interstate Highway System.  The jobs created by these projects didn’t just come from laying down track or pavement.  They came from businesses that opened near a town’s new train station or the new off-ramp.”

And these businesses were encouraged by government supports, supports that started in the first years of the Republic and have continued ever since.

Ryan could overlook this because his ideological deduction demanded it.  The private sector, good; the public sector bad.  Then and only then can one absolutely know that public investments in education, transportation, communications and much more never work.

Free market ideology drives Ryan’s and his fellow Republicans’ position.  The persuasiveness of Obama’s address was not only because his authoritative position and the glamor of its setting.  It was rich in substance and nuance, while Ryan, along with Bachmann, presented political clichés.

It was reported in yesterday’s New York Times that Daniel Bell, the great sociologist and public figure, died after a long fruitful life.  One of his great books is The End of Ideology.  I think that yesterday I had a glimpse of ideology’s newest ending.

Watch Obama’s speech

Watch Ryan’s speech

Watch Bachmann’s speech

The recent movie “The King’s Speech,” has been well and broadly reviewed for the wonderful acting of stars Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. The film recounts the story of the arduous treatment of King George VI of England’s debilitating stutter. While the film tells a story of what media pundits call “an unlikely friendship” between Lionel Logue, an Australian actor manqué who has developed a speech defects practice and the imminently to-be-crowned British monarch, it  addresses many issues relevant to the mystery of sovereignty itself. As we approach President Barack Obama’s second State of the Union address, and think about our own executive’s voice, “The King’s Voice” can be gainsaid for the way it animates key sociological insights into the nature of political legitimacy, sovereignty, democracy, and the role of the leader’s rhetoric in binding a nation together (especially a nation at war).

Ever since Ernst Kantorowicz analyzed the medieval theological innovation of the “king’s two bodies,” (a theology that managed the contradictory ideas that the king is divine and thus immortal and that the king is mortal and thus vulnerable to corruption and disease), we have recognized the ways in which real-world kings and presidents have been maneuvering to appear human and transcendent simultaneously. Other sociological and anthropological work on transcendence, political ritual, war and legitimacy (Durkheim, Weber, and Geertz spring to mind) has made us conscious of the ways that rulers use their bodies and their voices to demonstrate and symbolize the collectivities they rule.  Historically they have done so by highlighting their sovereign exceptionalism. At the same time, an American democratic diffidence toward transcendence and the divine has also insisted that our leaders be “just like us.”

“The King’s Speech” draws our attention to the role of the voice of the monarch in addressing the nation and, in moments of national peril, literally constituting the nation as a self-conscious entity ready to make sacrifices. George VI, catapulted by the abdication of his older brother into being king, must make an important speech as Britain goes to war in September 1939. He stutters badly under the best of circumstances and struggles to make his voice perform its authority. Meanwhile, the elected government of Britain actually takes the country to war, apparently accepting this symbolic division of sovereign labor as the King addresses the nation by way of his radio speech. The film plays with the liminal moments of sovereignty – changes of tone and posture and eye gaze are immediate upon the death of George V with his wife and sons in the room and the immediate transfer of sovereignty from George V to Edward VIII; more changes later upon George VI accepting his brother’s abdication. The film appears to be more explicit about democratic challenges to royalty in highlighting the ironic and playful banter engaged in by Lionel Logue as a commoner who “talks back” to a king.  That Lionel, the commoner, can speak easily and Bertie, the king cannot is indeed ironic – but the film stops there in its deconstruction of the British monarchy.  It, too, remains in the thrall of the sovereign sacred.  Nevertheless, the film brilliantly focuses on the non-trivial qualities of speech, voice, gesture, and presence in constituting legitimate authority.

As Barack Obama, a wartime president, prepares his own exhortation to the nation, commentators have already anticipated the importance of the sovereign voice. Writing in Newsweek, Jonathan Alter notes that the nation needs rousing and that: “Fortunately, we have a president with the rhetorical skills to rouse us. Unfortunately, he hasn’t so far. Obama’s biggest mistake in his first two years was that he took Mario Cuomo’s famous dictum—“you campaign in poetry and govern in prose”—too much to heart. To succeed, he needs to govern in poetry, too. He needs to use the music of his voice to sell math and science and engineering and entrepreneurship and all the other skill sets we let deteriorate when our brightest college graduates went to work on Wall Street.”

Alter is right about the need to govern in poetry, but he’s wrong about the substantive referent. The sovereign voice is domesticated and profanized when it speaks of math, science, and entrepreneurship, no matter how important these things are for society. The core of sovereignty lies with its authority to wage war.

Ultimately, as Max Weber taught us, political legitimacy relies upon the constant reiteration of the state’s monopoly of the legitimate use of force – violence, the war and the nation bound together, the nation heeding the voice of the sovereign, for better or for worse. The United States of America is still fighting a war that has uncertain enemies, uncertain goals and uncertain achievements.  Barack Obama may speak of many things in his State of the Union address, but he must find a way to re-authorize the war that the nation is currently waging, to make it necessary and legible for his nation. Unlike George VI, Obama has been known to be a brilliant speaker, but both sovereigns have shared the mandate of legitimizing war in the eyes and ears of their nations with their voice.