Obama speaks directly to people of Fayette County
So much has been written about President Obama’s state-of-the-union message that the nation should keep its distance from that Donald Trump fella, that you may have missed some other important points the president made, including one with particular meaning for those of us who live in former coal country.
The president’s address, delivered last Tuesday to a joint session of Congress, rather than being devoted to legislation initiatives, urged lawmakers and citizens, in the words of Lincoln which he cited, to “think anew and act anew” on a range of problems.
It was arguably the best speech Barack Obama has given while in the White House.
Shame on Speaker Paul Ryan for telling the AP that Obama had degraded the presidency by speaking out so forcefully, especially on immigration.
If the White House is “pre-eminently a place of moral leadership” — a thought entertained by Franklin Roosevelt — then the president was only doing his job.
These are some of the other points he made:
1. The accelerating pace of change in the work force and the emergence of a truly worldwide, interconnected economy makes it harder for businesses to compete and for working Americans to earn a decent living.
“Today,” the president said, “technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated.”
“Companies in a global economy,” he continued, “can relocate anywhere, and face tougher competition. As a result, workers have less leverage for a raise. Companies have less loyalty to their communities. And more and more wealth and income is concentrated at the very top.”
A great many decent, hard-working Americans, he said, find themselves in a vise not of their own making, “squeezed” to the maximum even if they have jobs.
Many blue collar and more and more white collar workers are “offended” by the situation they find themselves in, which strikes at the very heart of the idea that hard work should be rewarded with financial security.
No wonder the middle class is restless and ready to revolt.
Among the short-term solutions mentioned by the president in his speech was one that sounded especially promising: “wage insurance” for workers who find themselves suddenly thrown to the wolves and worried about paying essential bills.
All in all, President Obama’s prescription for righting the ship seemed exceedingly weak, but then, again, legislative remedies weren’t the focus of the speech.
2. In regard to the nation’s post-coal future, he insisted that instead of cursing the darkness, we should light a candle, or two.
A topic of special concern for millions of Americans who live in the washed out regions of the coal industry, Barack Obama might well have been speaking directly to western Pennsylvanians and more broadly to folks in southern Appalachia.
The president said: “Rather than subsidize the past, we should invest in the future — especially in communities that rely on fossil fuels.”
Just as the president spoke these words, NBC trained a camera on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is more than a little fond of charging the administration with waging war on coal. McConnell hails from Kentucky, and he’s found that using such language is good politics.
“Stop Obama’s War On Coal” is the message on signs erected in a great many western Pennsylvania front yards during election season. You can even find the message posted in Fayette County, which hasn’t had much of a coal industry for decades now.
An exclamation point on the bleak future of coal in western Pennsylvania was the closing of the former West Penn Power plant in Greene County, opposite Masontown, in the summer of 2013.
The coal-burning plant ran afoul of federal environmental regulations, for sure; but the real culprits were corporate profitability — its current owner, First Energy, was looking to maximize profits — and the changing nature of the energy marketplace, with natural gas increasingly crowding out coal.
The president’s point was that it serves no useful purpose to act as if coal has a bright future. Political leaders, whether in Washington, Harrisburg, or in various county seats, who say otherwise, are playing a vicious political game. They would rather win votes than provide wins for their beleaguered constituents.
Fayette Countians should be especially sensitive on this front. The county was shortchanged over many decades by the failure of leaders in both politics and business to prepare for the demise of an active coal industry.
We are still living with the consequences of that failure, going all the way back to the 1920s and even earlier.
Finally, President Obama addressed the worrisome condition of our politics — a condition characterized not merely by a political but a cultural and civic disdain for one another.
“Democracy … require(s) basic bonds of trust between its citizens,” the president told Congress and the nation. “It doesn’t work if we think the people who disagree with us are all motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic.”
It’s time to stop the practice, President Obama said, of rigging elections by allowing the parties to construct partisan legislative districts, so much so that general elections for Congress and seats in state capitals (including Harrisburg) are charades of democracy, not the real thing at all.
Perhaps the president has already hit on one way of breaking the gridlock of political rhetoric, a dead end, if there ever was one. Several days before he ventured up to Congress, he participated in a CNN — broadcast of a question-and-answer session with both supporters and opponents. The participants were citizens, not office holders.
The questions from opponents were tough but fair; the president’s responses were thoughtful and hopefully enlightening.
It would be a good idea for him to do more of these. He might engage occasionally only with opponents, with a neutral moderator to keep things on track, of course.
The purpose of these nationwide broadcasts would not be to defang the opposition or to negate the importance of politics and vigorous debate. Instead, they would serve to emphasize that we have real problems begging for real solutions.
Ideally, they would help us recapture the sense that we are citizens of a common country with common concerns.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books -“Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.