With the clock ticking down the final seconds of a close game, a trailing football team often resorts to a last-ditch scoring effort. The quarterback fades back and lofts toward the end zone a long, arcing “Hail Mary” pass, so named because it will take an answered prayer to succeed in overturning a seemingly inevitable loss.
With his address to the nation in front of a joint session of Congress Thursday night, Barack Obama is about to launch a Hail Mary pass, aptly timed to coincide with the opening night of the new National Football League season after a spring and half-summer of labor-management unrest and ultimate compromise.
Unlike the owners and players who worked out a deal to get the games going again, there is no realistic partner to work with Obama. Despite vague language from some Republicans about the need to stimulate the economy to jumpstart more hirings, anyone who believes the president and the GOP/Tea Party will reach a fair, equitable and non-acrimonious settlement also believes the Cincinnati Bengals will hoist the Lombardi Trophy at the conclusion of the next Super Bowl.
Obama’s ratings are lower than a quarterback who throws more interceptions than completions, who fumbles the snap before he can hand off to a running back. Even a rookie presidential candidate, the nationally untested governor of Texas, Rick Perry, beats Obama in a head to head contest, 44% to 41%, according to a new Rasmussen poll.
The president’s Thursday night speech will define his intentions over the next 14 months. He will either involuntarily concede his impotence by tossing out an often repeated and unaccepted pitch for bi-partisan compromise, or he will morph into a chief executive with backbone by staking out an irreversible battle plan to rekindle the passion of those who supported him in 2008.
He has shown an inability to connect with Republicans. So why bother extending an olive branch. They’d only reject it. How often must he be humiliated? When push comes to shove, they’ll corner Obama and the Democrats into accepting their cuts, their budget, on their terms, which means no tax increases for the wealthy, continued loopholes for the rich and corporations, no viable plan to energize job growth except by reducing or eliminating consumer and environmental protections.
If Obama recognizes, at long last, the GOP prevent defense, he can perhaps salvage his re-election drive by forcefully decoding the X’s and O’s that differentiate the Republican agenda from his own. He shouldn’t be afraid to use tables, charts and graphs (a la Ross Perot and even Michele Bachmann) to illustrate how under Republican stewardship the nation’s working and middle classes suffered while the rich benefited, and how more of the same could be expected should they succeed in the next election.
Don’t think for a moment a measured tone in the well of the Congress will accrue civility and points from the opposition. Obama can and must use this forum to get the attention of Congress and the American people that he intends to fight for the welfare of the country as a whole, not for an elite, special interest minority.
He needs to convincingly detail how supporting GM and Chrysler when they were bankrupt saved the American automobile industry, how millions of jobs were saved, from the small shop that supplies new car mats to the huge plant that makes car batteries. He needs to push for jobs to rebuild infrastructure, for teachers to educate future generations.
Republicans already label him a deficit spender. He needs to reassuringly explain why short term debt is necessary to rebuild an economy shattered by two wars started by a Republican president, by that president’s profligate Medicare drug reimbursement plan, by that president’s eight year reign of terror on government oversight of the financial markets that led to the current woes on Wall Street and around the world.
Does he have it in him? Does he have the arm to reach the end zone? Hail Mary passes seldom work, but when they do they can be a game changer, turning a loser into a winner. Obama has nothing to lose by playing offense. Indeed, it’s his only hope of reaching the end zone—securing four more years in a residence paid for by The American taxpayer.
