Restoring the American Dream

The defining issue of the 2012 presidential campaign is the American dream. For Americans who are unemployed or underemployed, it is dead or on life support. President Obama spent his State of the Union speech Tuesday night trying to convince Americans that he can revive the dream if given a second term.

Obama’s problem is that he promised change for the better in his first campaign and, in many voters’ eyes, he has failed to deliver. At least, that’s the view of many liberals. Conservatives, by contrast, believe he delivered the wrong kind of change, that is, change for the worse. His speech, then, was an appeal to the American people of the political left and center to stick with him.

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FDR promised the New Deal. JFK promised the New Frontier. Obama promised the Fair Shot, that everyone will get a fair shot to succeed. His message is that everyone does not have that now, and it plays on the theme of inequality of incomes and opportunity, crony capitalism, a system stacked against the little guy. A Republican Party system, in other words.

In a single paragraph, the president hit on "obstruction," "outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits," all words with which he hopes to tar Republicans.

What he promised, in the same paragraph, was "an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values."

Note the language about "American values," a special province of the political right that the president isn’t going to cede. He also invoked "responsibility" repeatedly, a word that conservatives reiterate as a core value, but which the president appropriated for himself. Obama’s re-election strategy will rely on a moral crusade of its own, a campaign against the rich who grasp the economy’s fruits for themselves but pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class wage earners. The president, needless to say, would change that.

Otherwise, his program for economic development is familiar by now: investments in alternative energy, in manufacturing jobs at home, in infrastructure, in education and worker retraining, in research. There was little that was new.

The truth is that neither Barack Obama and the Democrats nor Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney and the Republicans have new ideas to offer in the battle over their competing visions of America. The candidate will win who best frames his message about how to restore the American Dream. Obama made a good start for his side on Tuesday night.