And those progressive proposals of his? They really aren't that big a deal when you look at them closer.

Take that call for taxing the rich more. It's really about raising an additional $320 billion in taxes on the wealthy, primarily by slightly raising the capital gains tax to 28%. But that's over 10 years, and it’s still not much higher than what a middle-class worker pays on earned wages. The actual increase in taxes on the wealthy then, for just using money to make more money, would only bring in an additional $32 billion per year, which is only half of what analysts say the cost of making community college free would cost! Given that there are 100 million US taxpayers, most of them "middle class" (which the president apparently defines as over poverty level, and earning less than $200,000 per year), the $360 billion in tax breaks they would receive (also over ten years) under his proposals, would work out to only $36 billion per year, or $360 per taxpayer per year. Nice if you can get it, but hardly an amount that would make a dent in the chasm of a wealth gap that has opened up in the US over the last two decades...

It would be bad enough if, at this late point in his second term of office, this president had really come through with a New Deal-like proposal for a whole progressive transformation of the US economy. Bad enough because he should have, and could have, done that back at his first SOTU address in January 2009, at a time when the Democratic Party was in control of both the House and the Senate and he had an electorate that had elected him overwhelmingly in expectation of dramatic action. Instead he began his first term as the nation's first black president by backing away from every progressive promise that he had made while campaigning, starting with telling workers that he would defer a promise to immediately pass "card check" legislation making it much easier to organize a union (that idea ended up being dropped entirely by the Obama White House). But in this latest speech he offered up only pale imitations and illusions of progressive reform: tiny tax breaks for the middle class, tiny tax increases for the wealthy, vague calls for climate action, for a higher minimum wage and for making it easier for unions to organize (no details there).

It appears what the president was really doing in this SOTU speech was setting things up so that Democrats, who for six years have done nothing of consequence for ordinary Americans (and that includes passage of the very pro-insurance-industry Affordable Care Act, instead of a Canadian-style single-payer state-owned medical insurance: Medicare for all), and who got punished for it by losing the Senate and losing more seats in the House last November, can spend the next two years harmlessly posing as progressives. They won't have to actually deliver anything since they are now in the minority. That way, they hope they can delude the voters once again into thinking they're serious so they can again win the presidency and maybe win back the Senate in 2016. Meanwhile, they hope the party's corporate backers on Wall Street, and in the corporate suites of the arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry and other sectors, will understand that they don't really mean it about progressive reform, and will thus keep bankrolling them, knowing that if they succeed in taking back control in DC, they will once again be the willing servants of corporate America.