Listened to Obama’s fifth State of the Union address Tuesday night and was not surprised to hear many of the same small-bore themes we’ve heard from this president many times before. I am not someone you could describe as disappointed in the president: he is very much the kind of leader I expected him to be following his 2008 election. Probably the most prescient look at the then-early Obama presidency in 2009 was published in Harper‘s under the title Barack Hoover Obama. The author Kevin Baker pointed out that, like Obama, Hoover was a very intelligent, well educated, worldly, and highly capable man – that was the reason he was elected president.

And yet, Hoover failed miserably. Baker sums it up in this passage:

Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life, believing as much as he did in activist government, he still could not convince himself to take the next step and accept that the basic economic tenets he had believed in all his life were discredited; that something wholly new was required. Such a transformation would have required a mental suppleness that was simply not in the makeup of this fabulously successful scientist and self-made businessman. And it was this inability to radically alter his thinking that, ultimately, distinguished Hoover from Franklin Roosevelt.

This is, in a nutshell, reflective of the tragedy of Barack Obama, who was elevated to presidency at a moment in our history when enormous economic challenges demanded solutions of similar magnitude; when every month upwards of 750,000 Americans joined the ranks of the unemployed; when our hopelessly corrupted investment banking system was imploding and homeowners faced with a tsunami of foreclosures. Yes, he stanched the bleeding, but for a variety of reasons – not least of which being a lack of willingness to try something different – he did not provide an alternative vision of society that would have place us on the road to full employment, environmental sustainability, guaranteed housing, single-payer health care, and secure retirement.

What do we have instead? A vague proposal for something called MyRA and other similarly lame initiatives. We need to drive a more progressive agenda forward. If God had intended voting to be consequential, s/he would have given us decent candidates. It’s really just up to us.

luv u,

jp