{"id":30211,"date":"2011-01-25T01:53:18","date_gmt":"2011-01-24T23:53:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishforum.com.tr\/en\/content\/?p=30211"},"modified":"2023-07-26T12:01:43","modified_gmt":"2023-07-26T09:01:43","slug":"in-state-of-the-union-obama-to-call-for-competitiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2011\/01\/25\/in-state-of-the-union-obama-to-call-for-competitiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"In State of the Union, Obama to call for \u2018competitiveness\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

24 January 2011 <\/a>close<\/a><\/span>Author: the Mesh Report Staff<\/strong><\/span> Name<\/strong>: the Mesh Report Staff
\nEmail:<\/strong> pablo@adammesh.com
\n<\/span>See Authors Posts (1278)<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

By\u00a0Perry Bacon Jr.Washington Post Staff Writer<\/p>\n

President Obama will call for a broad \u201ccompetitiveness\u201d initiative in Tuesday night\u2019s State of the Union address, proposing a series of steps the United States should take to retain its standing as the world\u2019s largest and most influential economy.<\/p>\n

White House officials say the speech will include a number of ideas, from increasing the number of U.S. exports to improving the American education system.<\/p>\n

In speeches over the last two months, the president has previewed this competitiveness theme\u2013warning in a December address in North Carolina, for example, that without greater innovation, the U.S.could fall behind other countries, as it did briefly in the 1950s when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth.<\/p>\n

In a\u00a0speech Friday at General Electric plant in upstate New York, Obama said that the \u201cnew mission\u201d of his administration\u2019s policies would be to \u201cdo everything we can to ensure that businesses can take root and folks can find good jobs and America is leading the global competition that will determine our success in the 21st century.\u201d<\/p>\n

The competitiveness idea is supposed to link the administration\u2019s proposals for increasing spending on education and other long-time Democratic priorities with its agenda to create more jobs as America recovers from the recession.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy principal focus . . . is going to be making sure that we are competitive, that we are growing, and we are creating jobs,\u201d Obama said in a\u00a0preview video of the speech sent to supporters Saturday.<\/p>\n

But officials have\u00a0bumped up against multiple problems as they have worked on the economic components of the address, which comes weeks before the White House will release the budget for the next fiscal year.<\/p>\n

Administration officials said they do not believe another major stimulus bill is possible with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, leaving them struggling to find another mechanism to create jobs. At the same time, many ideas Republicans are willing to embrace \u2013 such as a reduction in the payroll tax \u2013 have already been included in the December tax deal.<\/p>\n

Along with the economic focus, Democratic officials briefed on the speech said, Obama will challenge members of both parties to prove wrong the widely-held perception that the next two years will be full of political\u00a0gridlock.<\/p>\n

With members of both parties\u00a0seated together in the gallery for the first time, the appeal will dovetail with Obama\u2019s new-found emphasis on\u00a0reaching out to Republicans and working more closely with the business community, which opposed much of his agenda during his first two years in office.<\/p>\n

In discussing foreign policy, Obama is expected to underscore the end-of-year deadline for all U.S. troops to leave Iraq. Regarding Afghanistan, Obama will highlight the July deadline he has set for the start of troop withdrawals, a process scheduled to unfold through 2014 at a pace to be determined by conditions on the ground.<\/p>\n

But on other subjects, what exactly the president will say remains unclear.<\/p>\n

Gun-control groups are pushing for Obama to embrace stricter gun laws in the wake of the shooting in Tucson. Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said he wants Obama to support specific legislation, but would be satisfied if the president instead appointed a commission to look at the causes of gun violence.<\/p>\n

\u201cA national tragedy took place, there should be a response,\u201d Helmke said. He added of the Tucson shooting, \u201cno laws were broken until [the gunman] starting shooting.\u201d<\/p>\n

White House officials have been non-committal on supporting any new legislation, and have not said if Obama will address gun control in his speech.<\/p>\n

Liberal groups are wary of Obama including in the speech the conclusions of the bi-partisan deficit commission, which released a report in December that proposed controversial ideas such as a gradual increase in the retirement age.<\/p>\n

The president will emphasize the importance of deficit reduction in the speech, but it\u2019s not clear if he will offer specific proposals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe White House has prematurely turned to deficit reduction,\u201d said Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America\u2019s Future, a liberal activist group. \u201cVoters are clear, they care about the deficit, but their first priority is jobs and the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

The speech is some ways less important than was anticipated a few months ago, because the administration started recalibrating its domestic agenda and approach immediately after the November elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the president has gone to school on lessons learned,\u201d said Kenneth Duberstein, former chief of staff to President Reagan, one of many Washington veterans Obama consulted after his party\u2019s election defeat in November. \u201cOne would hope he continues to down the path that began in the\u00a0lame-duck session as far reaching out.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while the speech will loom large on prime-time television Tuesday night, and in the media stratosphere for many hours afterward, experts cautioned that its shelf life will most likely be relatively short.<\/p>\n

\u201cWho remembers them six weeks later, let alone a year or two,\u201d said Robert Dallek, a presidential historian. \u201cHow many State of the Union addresses do people remember? They don\u2019t resonate that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

24 January 2011 closeAuthor: the Mesh Report Staff Name: the Mesh Report Staff Email: pablo@adammesh.com See Authors Posts (1278) By\u00a0Perry Bacon Jr.Washington Post Staff Writer President Obama will call for a broad \u201ccompetitiveness\u201d initiative in Tuesday night\u2019s State of the Union address, proposing a series of steps the United States should take to retain its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":783463,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[4048],"class_list":["post-30211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa","tag-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30211\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783463"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}