Suburban observers see Obama strike pragmatic tone
On the campaign trail and during his first 24 months in office, President Barack Obama promised and worked toward expansive plans driven by a liberal agenda.
Among them, health care and financial regulatory reform. A timeline for exiting Iraq and Afghanistan. Improving schools and creating jobs by the millions.
He had both a Democratic House and Senate at his back, and time — a full four years — on his side.
Two years later, he looked out on a Congress awash with red, taking a decidedly more pragmatic and centrist tone in his midterm State of the Union address Tuesday night.
“Now is the time for both sides and houses of Congress — both Republicans and Democrats — to forge a principled compromise that gets the job done. If we make the hard choices now to rein in our deficits, we can make the investments we need to win the future,” Obama said.
The 61-minute talk symbolically served to set the stage for the latter half of his four-year term, and kick off his 2012 re-election campaign.
With exit polls showing unemployment, still hovering over 9 percent, as the No. 1 issue, the federal debt second, Obama's speech displayed a metamorphosis from idealist to pragmatist, taking a page from his Democratic predecessor, President Bill Clinton.
“It seems to me that most people are in the now and the future. Obama knows that,” said Sharon Alter, professor emerita of political science at Harper College in Palatine. “The now and the future are the economy and the debt.”
In January 1995, months after Democrats lost control of Congress, Clinton pledged to be more faithful to the wishes of voters, whom he called “the keepers of sacred trust.”
Similarly, Obama pledged to rebuild faith in government.
He called for doing so through bipartisan work to increase jobs and lower the deficit.
The president called for freezing annual domestic spending for the next five years, which he says will reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade. He pledged to veto every single bill containing earmarks.
He called for government transparency — noting that soon, taxpayers will be able to log onto a website to see how and where their tax dollars are being spent.
Suburban residents and members of the Illinois congressional delegation, while noting the challenges of the first two years of the president's term, welcomed the change in focus.
“He came on board with an economy that was in a deep recession. I don't know why anyone would have wanted to take that on, but he did. You try to handle the cards you're dealt,” said Kim White of Naperville, who traveled to Obama's 2008 inauguration with her husband Benny and two children.
White, who voted for Obama in 2008, says she supports the president's agenda but would like to see a stronger focus on job creation over the past two years.
“I think you kind of have to put everything down, you have to prioritize. In my mind, job creation would have been, should have been, first and foremost,” she said.
Like White, Greg Koeppen, executive director of the Lake County Farm Bureau in Grayslake, was at the inauguration.
Reflecting on the past two years, Koeppen, a Republican active in suburban politics, said he believes Obama “took on a lot of big issues early on and didn't get the support from both the American public and fellow politicians (that he needed). It was too big and too fast for a new administration. That pulled a lot of people back.”
Obama said steps taken over the past two years have “broken the back of the recession,” but “to win the future, even bigger challenges must be tackled.”
Obama called for three major investments: innovation, education and infrastructure.
Nearly a dozen times throughout the speech, Obama declared a need to “win the future,” drawing parallels between his calls for research and development and the space race of the 1950s.
Deeming it “our generation's Sputnik moment,” Obama called for America to establish world dominance in biomedical research, information technology and clean energy, paid for in part by ending subsidies to big oil.
After describing the Race to the Top federal education stimulus program as “the most meaningful reform to our public schools in a generation,” he called for a bigger commitment to education, training 100,000 new science, math, technology and engineering teachers in the next 10 years. Obama also plans to request that Congress makes the $10,000 tuition tax credit permanent.
The country's infrastructure will be improved by “putting Americans to work on crumbling roads and bridges,” projects funded by public-private partnerships.
Touching on immigration, Obama said he was prepared to work with Republicans and Democrats address border control and provide students living in the country illegally with a path to citizenship.
Obama noted he was open to “improvements to health care legislation,” beginning with what he termed a “flaw in the legislation that places an unnecessary bookkeeping burden on small businesses,” a change that is backed by a majority of suburban congressmen.
Reinforcing a renewed sense of bipartisanship was the seating arrangement in the House chamber.
After the shooting Jan. 8 in Tuscon, Ariz., that killed six and injured 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, dozens of members of Congress — Republican Sen. Mark Kirk and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, and Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski and Republican Rep. Robert Dold among them — announced their plans to break tradition of sitting on opposite sides of the chamber. Durbin and Kirk were seated in one of the very front rows, Kirk diligently taking notes throughout.
Rich with symbolism as the break in tradition was, it means little if not followed by action, Obama warned.
“What comes of this moment is up to us. What comes of this moment will be determined not by whether we can sit together tonight, but whether we can work together tomorrow.”
Though wary of the cost of his outlined investments, Obama's repeated concessions to Republicans were not lost among suburban members of Illinois' delegation.
“There where moments when it sounded like he hired a Republican speechwriter,” said 13th District Rep. Judy Biggert, of Hinsdale.
&bul; Daily Herald staff writer Nicole Thompson and Daily Herald news services contributed to this report.