- AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, pool
- President Obama delivers his State of the Union address to Congress last year. Few of his proposals came to pass.
Another State of the Union address is coming tomorrow to a flat screen near you, and I bet you can hardly wait.
The federal minimum wage in the wealthiest nation on Earth then was $7.25, and so it remains. Tomorrow, Obama likely will again call for an increase—this time to $10.10 by 2016, in accordance with a Senate bill. At least the president’s minimum-wage proposal keeps rising, if not the wage itself.
He told the story of Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl who “loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss”—a majorette who performed in the president’s inauguration festivities, and who was shot to death a week later a mile from Obama’s house. He pointed out her parents in the House chamber. “They deserve a vote,” the president said. “Gabby Giffords”—the congresswoman who was shot in the head near Tuscon and survived—”deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote. . . . The countless other communities ripped open by gun violence—they deserve a simple vote.”
And it’s not just that the president isn’t putting out at fund-raisers in order to save himself for his real work. Obama knows that most of his major legislation will not pass, Remnick observes, “and so there is in him a certain degree of reduced ambition.”
