Opinion: A State of the Union scorecard shows Obama can live without Congress
The State of the Union is like the Super Bowl. There’s always a big buildup. It gets a large TV audience. The real action takes only an hour. And after it’s over, it’s analyzed to death and then largely forgotten.
And so it will be tonight. Some 30 million Americans will watch — a number that has declined steadily for years — and they won’t hear much that is new. President Obama will ask for little from Congress, and that’s about all he’ll get, given that both the Senate and House are controlled by Republicans. Some ideas that he has already floated, free tuition for community college and paid sick leave for workers, are interesting, but won’t get far with the GOP and the president knows it. The president will say tonight that without more cooperation, he’ll have no choice but to act on his own, as he has over the last few years (more on this in a minute).
What Obama does know is that he leaves office exactly two years from today. As all presidents do, he’s thinking about legacy and if he were smart, he’d just hold up this morning’s Wall Street Journal says:
(snip)
Since most of the ideas Obama will discuss tonight will be received by Republicans as they have for several years now —with silence and inaction — Obama will continue, if not step up, his use of executive power. He’ll complain about lack of cooperation from Republicans, but perhaps given the improving economy, he doesn’t need them anyway.
more at link
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/a-state-of-the-union-scorecard-shows-obama-can-live-without-congress-2015-01-20
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