A Grim & Divided State Of The Union

Tonight, President Obama will address Congress and the nation in his first State Of The Union speech. News Junkie Post’s political editor, Leigh Ann Caldwell, collected various opinions on what the President is expected to talk about, and also on the issues he should be addressing in his speech. It is expected that the main “target” of the President’s oratorical skills will be the American middle class, or to be more precise the disarray of the vanishing middle class which has seen, in the last few years, the American dream of the little-house-with-a-white-picket-fence become, all too often the nightmare of foreclosure and joblessness.

Optimism is one of the greatest quality of the  American people, but like any quality there is another side to it. In this instance, the other side of the coin is the naivety in the belief  that a man alone could miraculously make all the serious systemic problems of America go away with a magic wand. President Obama was expected, by many Americans, to become a providential great “Healer in Chief” leading them to a new American dream, or at least one without the burden of our toxic and divided political discourse. A year later, the unrealistic euphoria, floating in the air after the elections, has become a painful daily grind with more set backs than brisk progress.

A year ago, when President Obama took the helm of the enormous ship that is America, he had the dubious honor to become the Captain of the Titanic right before the ship collided into an iceberg. The iceberg was of course the global financial collapse, and to be honest “Captain Bush” is not the only one who should be blame for stirring the ship into it. America had been sailing on a disastrous and misguided coalition course with reality for the past 30 years, and to a large extend it still does. The systemic problems are deep, and unfortunately for the people, most American politicians do not have the ability or the desire to think outside the box. They just keep relying on old formula and obsolete ideological fights.

Ordinary Americans, across the political spectrum, are anxious and angry at the political class & the “fat cats” of Wall Street  for not doing enough to ease their pains. A recent poll shows that one in four Americans do not have enough food to feed themselves and their families. For the richest and most powerful country in the world, this is just plainly unacceptable. Yet, the Obama administration has so far pursued policies which can not remedy this tragic situation.

Yesterday, an event in Washington DC went unnoticed by most media outlets: 13 peace activists were arrested right in front of the White House. What I find puzzling is the fact that the demonstration didn’t have 100,000 people. This is not about the somehow slightly Utopian dream of world peace, it is more prosaically about doing the math. Lately, the President has been talking about tackling the soaring budget deficit, but unfortunately he is not addressing the systemic problem bleeding the US economy dry. The real problem is the $700 billion a year gorilla in the room, which is the US military spending. Without this “monkey on our back”, we could certainly afford universal health care, good public education, rebuild America’s crumbling  infra-structure and tackle critical global problems such as climate change.

Editor’s Note: This article was published 1 1/2 hour before President Obama’s State of the Union speech. Please read the full transcript of President Obama’s speech.