A State of the Union for the Age of Polarization

“We have long memories,” Barack Obama said of Americans last night. He might as well have been talking about the long public memory of himself. From his first appearance on the public stage, at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama insisted that the country was unified, and, since then, he has made that insistence his theme. Political polarization, as it solidified in the years following his election, became a rebuke to his Presidency: even normal procedural truculence could be taken to suggest that the President’s view of Americans was naïve. When Obama has been confronted with deep hostility—when, for instance, the South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson called out “You lie!” in the middle Obama’s address to Congress in 2009—his habit has been to shift his gaze, look for another camera, and try to find some more direct line to the American people.* Addressing Congress each winter, Obama has insisted that the essential problem with the country is its politics. In the last twenty minutes of his final State of the Union speech, last night, Obama described a different and more profound split than he had before, one that ran deeper than the discord in Washington. Because of everything that had come before, the moment had an unusual power. What does the President think of Americans, anyway? His view, it turns out, has been in flux.