This week, there was a lot of commentary about the State of the Union, the title of the president's annual January speech before a joint session of Congress. I thought it was one of Obama's best addresses recently, because he focused on what is real for this country: growing economic inequality where only a few are doing "spectacularly well" while many families are still struggling just to get by.
The wife and mother from one of those families wrote the president a letter that seemed to have moved him, so he lifted up her "tight-knit family" trying to get through "hard times," as she sat up in the gallery next to First Lady Michelle Obama. Her family became a parable for a nation that is starting to do better economically but still faces hard choices that the president sought to address with very practical suggestions to support what he called "middle-class economics."
Obama's proposals for shifting tax breaks from the very wealthy to the middle class and to make possible child tax credits, days for sick leave, assistance with child care, and some relief from expensive educational costs are all proposals not likely to be supported by the new Republican Congress. But the speech begins to set what could be a long-term agenda to deal with our massive economic inequality -- finally. Even the Republicans now might have to face up to the increasingly visible, embarrassing, alarming, and morally indefensible gaps between a small elite and the rest of the country.