Get It Done

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/purdum/2013/02/political-realities-barack-obama

Get It Done

In his State of the Union address, President Obama laid out an ambitious agenda—and, frankly, a bipartisan one, if only Republicans would admit where some of the ideas come from. And a few things might even stand a chance.
By Todd S. Purdum


by Charles Dharapak-Pool/Getty Images.

Was it his last best chance? The only moment before his second term is consumed by the jockeying over whoever will succeed him? Was it the first time since 1997 that a president’s State of the Union message had been covered in a semi-split-screen way with a police story in California? Was it a speech that took a splintered Republican opposition not one but two speakers to oppose? Was it all those things—dignified and not so—that the pundits predicted it might be?

Or was it merely the moment when the re-elected Barack Obama said, “Let’s get it done,” whether or not he actually can?

I’d vote for the last. The president’s speech was strong and stirring and, yes, partisan, in the sense that Joe Biden often shot to his feet while John Boehner, seated together with the vice president behind Obama, usually sat on his hands.

But Obama, again and again, embraced ideas that were, at least once, bipartisan. These ranged from finding a path to comprehensive (read: sane) immigration reform,with “more boots on the Southern border than at any time in our history, and reducing illegal crossings to their lowest levels in 40 years,” to stepping up the government’s cyber-security measures, to proclaiming that on his visit to the Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyilast year a man had said, “There is justice and law in the United States. I want our country to be like that.”

The president’s tone was sharp and focused—as it had been in his second inaugural address last month—but he softened his message as well, with grace notes to the political realities facing him. It did not go unnoticed that he made a point of warmly shaking the hand of his bitter rival, John McCain, as he walked down the aisle, or made an equal point of praising McCain’s past work with former Senator Joe Lieberman on climate change. ​

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Obama may not “get it done.” But he is certainly trying.