Obama's day: Florida follow-up to big speech

Good morning from The Oval. On this day 23 years ago, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after take-off, killing all seven astronauts aboard; president Ronald Reagan postponed that night's scheduled State of the Union address.

President Obama delivered his State of the Union last night, and, as USA TODAY's Richard Wolf reports, talked about proposals to create jobs and reduce the budget deficit. USA TODAY's Susan Page notes that Obama focused on "hard times and tough choices."

Today, the president -- with Vice President Joe Biden -- follows up by visiting Florida for a town hall meeting at the University of Tampa.

Obama and Biden will announce an $8 billion grant in stimulus funds for a nationwide high-speed rail system. They will also tour an airplane maintenance center that has been used for aid flights to Haiti.

In his State of the Union, Obama also challenged Republicans to show leadership in light of their recent political success. Republicans said Obama displayed "long-windedness, hypocrisy and egotism," reports Kathy Kiely of USA TODAY.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told Gannett colleague James Carroll of the Louisville Courier-Journal that Obama delivered an "in-your-face" and "needlessly partisan" address, "at a time when Americans were looking for the president to move to the center and build coalitions."

Obama covered a lot of ground in his 69-minute address, including issues bound to make news in the weeks and months ahead. Among them:

Jobs. Obama called job creation his top priority, and gave shorter shrift to health care.

Bi-partisanship. Appeals for legislative comity became a major theme of his speech.

Campaign finance. Obama proposed new rules for corporate spending on campaigns, criticizing a recent Supreme Court decision on the topic; Justice Samuel Alito, sitting in front of Obama, vigorously dissented from the president's analysis.

Gay rights. The president advocated repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

The battle against al Qaeda. Obama pledged to take the fight to terrorists. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, meanwhile, asked that the upcoming trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be moved out of Manhattan, reports Kevin Johnson of USA TODAY.

Afghanistan. As Obama discussed his new war policy, Afghanistan president Hamid Karzai said it will take years to train his nation's military forces.

A laundry list of other pledges also highlighted the speech, and we'll discuss some of them in the hours ahead, along with reports of the Obama town hall in Florida. Keep clicking in, and have a good day.

Source:content.usatoday.com/

Obama Pushes $10,000 College Tax Credit and Student Debt Relief

President Barack Obama touted education among his top priorities in his first State of the Union address, proposing a $10,000 higher-education tax credit for families and debt forgiveness for people who have been repaying their college loans for at least 20 years.

Obama urged the U.S. Senate to join the House in overhauling the federal student-loan system, saying such a move would end “unwarranted taxpayer subsidies” to banks and help revitalize community colleges. He also supported an update of No Child Left Behind, the Bush administration education effort.

Obama said the cost of the higher-education initiatives would be offset by money saved from his plan to provide all new federal loans directly to students, instead of through private lenders led by the Reston, Virginia-based SLM Corp., known as Sallie Mae. While some Republican lawmakers have opposed this plan saying it may raise college costs, the Congressional Budget Office said it may save the government $80 billion in 10 years.

“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a world-class education,” Obama said in yesterday’s speech. “No one should go broke because they chose to go to college.”

Obama, who plans to send Congress his budget request for fiscal 2011 next week, said he’ll propose the $10,000 tax credit for families paying for four years of college, and more money for Pell Grants that help low-income students afford college. He also called for an expansion of an income-based student-loan repayment program the Education Department started in July.

“Let’s tell another 1 million students that when they graduate, they will be required to pay only 10 percent of their income on student loans, and all of their debt will be forgiven after 20 years -- and forgiven after 10 years if they choose a career in public service,” Obama said.

Student Loan Savings

The plan to provide federal college loans directly, approved by the House in September, aims to protect student loans from turmoil in financial markets and end federal payments that Obama says are wasteful. It would discontinue the 43-year- old Federal Family Education Loan Program that subsidizes and guarantees loans made by private lenders.

Starting in July, all new federal loans would be provided through a separate program, created in 1993, that lets the Education Department lend directly to students.

Representative John Kline of Minnesota, the top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, said such a plan may create new expenses for students.

“Making the federal government responsible for a larger share of student debt is likely to do nothing more than exacerbate high college costs,” Kline said yesterday in an e- mailed statement.

Education Budget

Obama’s budget plan, set to be released Feb. 1, includes a $3 billion raise in discretionary education funds next year, shielding federal school programs from his proposed freeze on some domestic spending, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said yesterday. That’s about 6 percent more than this year’s $47 billion discretionary budget for education programs other than Pell Grants, Education Department spokeswoman Sandra Abrevaya said yesterday in an e-mail.

The $3 billion contains Obama’s proposed $1.35 billion expansion of the Race to the Top competitive grant program, which rewards states that make the most progress in raising academic standards, boosting teacher quality, tracking student gains and improving failing schools.

That program, which will award $4.35 billion in stimulus grants to states this year, has “broken through the stalemate between left and right” on how to improve the nation’s public schools, Obama said.

‘Reward Success’

“Instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success,” Obama said. “Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform - reform that raises student achievement, inspires students to excel in math and science, and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young Americans.”

The budget proposal would allow another $1 billion in K-12 education spending, for a total of $4 billion, if lawmakers reauthorize No Child Left Behind this year, Duncan said.

The 2002 law, enacted under President George W. Bush, requires states to measure student achievement through standardized tests.

While states can set their own standards to determine what constitutes an adequate education, they can lose some federal funds if they don’t show yearly progress toward those goals.

Obama and Duncan have said the law prompted many states to weaken their academic standards and led schools to devote too much time to standardized test preparation. They want states to agree on a common set of tougher, nationwide standards. They also want to give states more flexibility in meeting those standards than they now have under No Child Left Behind.

“In this country, the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than on their potential,” Obama said.

Source:bloomberg.com/

The State of Obama

In the wake of the Massachusetts results, there was a lot of chatter among conservative pundits about whether Barack Obama was even capable of executing a strong pivot to the center. Jay Cost was uncertain, Jim Geraghty was skeptical — and Jonathan Last, provocatively, argued that Obama was as likely to prove as stubborn about course corrections as George W. Bush.

For my part, I figured that a pivot to the center was the plan all along — or at least, that it became the plan once Obama’s poll numbers started to sag, and the chances of steamrolling the whole Democratic agenda through Congress in his first two years evaporated. As soon as health care passed, securing his legacy as the true heir of L.B.J. and F.D.R., I assumed that Obama would start channeling the post-1994 Bill Clinton, and spend the run-up to the 2010 midterms talking round-the-clock about jobs, the deficit, and the middle class. And I assumed that he’d be good at it. Not Clinton good, maybe, but impressive all the same. He’s too much of a pragmatist, in the end, and too savvy a politician not to be able to execute a centrist turn when the situation seems to call for it.

But this pivot, if that’s what the White House planned, was contingent on a health care victory. Instead, the legislation has entered a weird political limbo, and taken Obama’s presidency into limbo with it.

That was certainly the impression left by tonight’s State of the Union, which struck me as the speech of a President who doesn’t know what narrative he’s selling. The eloquence was there, but the tone veered wildly — now self-critical, now self-justifying; now scolding, now conciliatory — and so did the substance. At times Obama channeled Clinton, promising to slash the deficit, touting his tax cuts, and floating small-bore, middle class-friendly policy proposals: Child care tax credits, student loan reforms, etc. At times he gave us a taste of what a McCain administration would have been like, pledging spending freezes, championing nuclear power, and bashing earmarks. Then he went populist on the banks, and played the economic nationalist on exports and energy — and, if you listened closely, on campaign finance as well. And large swathes of speech struck exactly the same notes (“don’t blame us, blame Bush” chief among them) that the White House has been striking all year, to diminishing returns.

As for health care — well, I’m still not sure what to make of the health care section, which seemed too tepid if the White House is still hoping to pass the legislation as it is, and too combative if they want to explore a smaller and more bipartisan bill. Yesterday Ezra Klein suggested that the White House has acted confused and uncertain on health care because it is confused and uncertain. That was exactly the sense tonight’s speech left me with — and presidential uncertainty can’t be a good thing for the legislation’s prospects.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the president: All State of the Unions tend to sprawl, and some of the tonal and substantive dissonances I’m picking up on here are inevitable in a big, detailed, cover-the-waterfront kind of address. But if there was ever a night to tighten things up, to narrow the focus, and to figure out a few big things you want to stay and a couple of big impressions you want to leave, then this was it. I came into the S.O.U. with two major questions: How is the administration going to handle health care in the wake of Massachusetts, and what kind of leader is Obama going to become if he has to govern amid a Republican resurgence? The President said a lot of things tonight, but he didn’t really answer either one of them.

Source:douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/