President Obama on Middle Class Focused Agenda (WHAT he SAID!)

new york times EDITORIAL

The Middle Class at Center Stage

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Published: July 24, 2013

Washington is a city of sideshows, full of people who consider it their job to create distractions from the nation’s most serious problems. Politicians would rather argue about nonexistent scandals or plot to undermine each other’s programs than come up with ways to create jobs or elevate the hopes of the next generation.

President Obama needs to change the subject to have a successful final term, and he announced on Wednesday, in forceful terms, that he intends to do just that. In a speech in Galesburg, Ill., he said his highest priority for the next 1,276 days would be rebuilding a middle class that has been battered by globalization, technological change, and the concentration of wealth at the highest levels.

“Washington has taken its eye off the ball,” he said, “and I am here to say this needs to stop.”

The fundamentally American idea that hard work leads to success, he said, has been undermined by an inattention to education and decades of government policies that favored only the rich. While income of the top 1 percent nearly quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, there has been almost no change in the typical family’s income.

And he wasn’t shy about pointing directly at Republicans who have made the problem worse by cutting spending when the economy needs new investments and by damaging the nation’s credit by threatening not to pay the government’s bills. The “meat cleaver called the sequester,” he said, has cost jobs, hurt the military and retarded progress in science and medicine.

Mr. Obama did not deliver a laundry list of new proposals. Most of what he advocated has been on his list for years: a major investment in rebuilding roads and power grids and school buildings; high-quality preschool for every 4-year-old; a reduction in college costs, a huge barrier between lower-income students and professional success; better incentives for retirement savings.

These ideas were good when he first proposed them as part of the American Jobs Act, and they remain essential ingredients of long-term economic growth. They are not “stale” and “tired,” as Republicans charged; they are familiar only because they remain unfulfilled. The hard-right that controls the Republican Party never really cared about the content of his proposals, anyway. It reflexively opposes whatever he supports.

The speeches he intends to give in the coming weeks on these ideas will be a counterweight to the idea that government needs to shrink to the point of irrelevance. He issued a clear challenge to his opponents: If you have better plans for strengthening manufacturing and improving the prospects of struggling families, let’s hear them. But, so far, Republicans have clung to an agenda of less: cutting taxes, cutting spending, cutting regulations and cutting any program that benefits those on the lowest rungs.

“Repealing Obamacare and cutting spending is not an economic plan,” he said. “But if we’re willing to take a few bold steps, if Washington will just shake off its complacency and set aside the kind of slash-and-burn partisanship that we’ve just seen for way too long, if we just make some common-sense decisions, our economy will be stronger a year from now.”

If the president himself doesn’t get distracted or lose heart in making that case, there is still a chance to put the government — and millions of people — back to work.