Interesting perspective from today's Boston Globe:
THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom heading into tonight’s State of the Union address is that President Obama is on the ropes, fighting for the credibility of health care reform, his signature initiative. And his congressional audience is in worse shape, so riven by partisanship that even basic responsibilities are going unaddressed, as no less of a bipartisan critic than former Defense Secretary Robert Gates charged in his new memoir.
There may be some truth in both analyses, but the fact is that 2013 wasn’t a terrible year for Obama, Congress, or the country. Indeed, the woeful assessments by most pundits illustrate just how much politics — or, more precisely, political rise-and-fall narratives — can cloud perceptions of the national condition.
In 2013, the stock market, a leading source of wealth and retirement income, soared, with the S&P 500 rising by 29.6 percent. The unemployment rate dropped from 7.9 percent in January to 6.7 percent in December. The budget deficit — source of so much anxiety in the 2012 election — plunged from $1.1 trillion in fiscal 2012 to $688 billion in fiscal 2013 and is on its way to another steep decline in fiscal 2014.
This didn’t come about via some quirk of the business cycle unconnected to the functioning of the government. In fact, Obama achieved the long-proposed income-tax hike on high earners, couples reporting more than $450,000 per year. Along with a 5 percent rise in the capital-gains tax rate and the end of a temporary reduction in the payroll tax, the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy helped restore fiscal equilibrium. Congress also showed unusual spending restraint, eventually passing a budget that neither party embraced but that represented an honest middle ground.
There were other breakthroughs: Defense spending, a sacred cow behind which both parties hid wasteful expenditures, came in for serious scrutiny. Total Pentagon receipts dropped from $645 billion in fiscal 2012 to $614 billion in fiscal 2013, with further reductions taking hold in fiscal 2014. Meanwhile, senators finally passed a comprehensive immigration bill, and, suddenly, positive signs on immigration reform are emanating from the House.
None of this erases the rancor in Washington, or the unconscionable lack of progress on, for instance, keeping guns from the violent or insane. But in a different political environment, a more positive narrative might well take hold. If, say, President Romney had just logged the same accomplishments in his first year in office, there’d be far more crowing from the rostrum than Obama is expected to engage in. That’s partly because Obama himself is dissatisfied, feeling that vital investments in infrastructure, clean energy, and medical research are being written out of the budget — to the detriment of the nation.
He’s right about that, and so are those who point out that some of the reduction in the unemployment rate came from frustrated job seekers leaving the market, and that the stock market rally was so great as to fan fears of an unsustainable bubble. But naysaying is easy, and real steps forward are hard. The bipartisan reading of 2013 is one of frustration and disappointment; but it’s not the whole story.
