Obama: Centrism at Home, Retreat Abroad

The new Barack Obama, the president who will govern the United States until the November 2012 elections without a Congressional majority, is more centrist and patriotic, and less progressive and polarizing. He is less audacious in his proposals, more appealing to the average voter. More like the coach that spurs his team into action to win the game than the rigid and detached professor. More attentive to the problems of his country and less interested in changing the world. His mind is set on ensuring that the 21st century will be an American one, but it’s also set on winning a second term in the White House.

This is the image of Obama that emerges after his second State of the Union address. Without a Democratic majority in Congress and mindful that he doesn’t have much leeway to govern, he opted to present his view of how America can maintain its leadership role in the face of emerging powers like China. The priority now with a divided country, after having overcome the worst recession in decades, is to create jobs and improve competitiveness so that the superpower can “win the future,” to borrow a phrase used repeatedly by the president on Tuesday night.

From the State of the Union address, a ritual that gives the president a pulpit to set the political agenda for the country, emerges an image with shades of the Republican Party. Yes, a party reinvigorated by victory in the November legislative elections that presumed a rejection of Obama’s reformist agenda. But also a divided party. On Tuesday, the tea party faction, the populist movement that propelled Republicans during Obama’s first two years, staged a small rebellion. The tea party leader in the House, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, offered a rebuttal to Obama’s speech that competed with the official rebuttal of the Republican Party. Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a rising star of the opposing party, offered that rebuttal.

Only Internal Affairs

State of the Union addresses rarely change the political dynamic, but they do reflect the moment, and, according to the audience on Capitol Hill, this is a time for the United States to retreat. Foreign policy played a minor role, making up only ten percent of the text read by Obama. It is customary, but as noted yesterday by essayist Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, Obama did not even bother to explain to Americans why these issues concern them. “The basic thrust of that speech is here are the places that we’re leaving,” said Kagan (those places being Iraq and Afghanistan).

In the speech there was only one line dedicated to Europe and no mention of the peace process in the Middle East, one of the failed efforts of the Obama administration. Even worse, there was no mention “that there were currently unprecedented protests in Egypt that very day,” lamented Kagan. “A tremendous missed opportunity,” according to the pundit, who stressed that foreign policy actually colored the whole message: Foreign policy, however, in competition with the rest of the world, calls to outperform the rest — especially China — and technology, infrastructure, education.

A Special People

The new Obama embodies a new American exceptionalism: the belief that the country has something special that sets it apart from others, a special universal mission (the American version of what would be called nationalism in other latitudes). In Tucson, where he spoke two weeks ago after the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, the president touched the national spirit, highlighting the heroism of ordinary Americans, able to show their best in extreme situations such as a shooting. Tuesday’s speech was also peppered with references to the greatness of the United States. “For all the hits we’ve taken these last few years, for all the naysayers predicting our decline, America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world.”

The attempt to recover American exceptionalism isn’t an unimportant one. Although nothing is as American as the biography and image of Obama, the first black president in the White House, suspicions about his patriotism and conspiracy theories about his nationality have grown within some groups on the right. By using the upbeat tone that recalls the Republican Ronald Reagan, the Democrat Obama is trying to reclaim the center, from where the opposition has tried to remove him in recent years. His centrist position is also evident in his messages to the business world: His request for tax cuts and investments in education, research and infrastructure — the main points of the speech — are the grievances of large corporations.

Additionally, the exceptionalist rhetoric enables the president to confront the anti-interventionist right and defend the need for state intervention in the economy in patriotic terms: The investments are needed to prevent the United States from slipping behind China and to continue to be dominant. The State of the Union address seems as if it will define the terms by which the 2012 presidential campaign will likely unfold.