Obama aims to transcend

Barack Obama went into the White House with designs on being a post-partisan president. But, in Palin-speak, that turned out to be nothing more than that "hopey-changy thing."

Republicans were still traditionally partisan, indeed with new resolve, intransigence and cynicism. Democrats were less thoroughly so, but their leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, were experts in partisan polarization.

So now the president, rebuffed in the mid-term elections, tries again.

He seeks to fashion a new American political culture jarred into greater human decency by the horror in Tucson.

Then he seeks to position himself in the place where Americans seem to want their president and the only place where presidents consistently succeed.

It is a place transcendent of party. It is a place where ideology is permitted, accepted and understood, but emphasized secondarily. It is a place that positions the president first and foremost as the well-meaning and comforting leader of all Americans.

This president's big mistake in the first two years was getting trapped into governing as a partisan Democrat, particularly on health care. He may not have had much choice. The Republicans seemed to have made him do it. But that did not matter in the damage it did.

So in his State of the Union address Tuesday, he tried to apply those lessons by advancing two main thematic points.

These points were designed to define a new American political environment and a new American economic predicament, a confluence by which he would be allowed, even encouraged, to transcend the partisan trap.

His first point was that the Tucson horror had made us think about the way we treat each other and about how, irrespective of our vigorous differences of opinion, our pain and our fear and our horror -- and presumably our hopes and dreams -- turn out to be shared.

The second point -- the epicenter of his speech -- he put this way: "This is our generation's Sputnik moment."

In 1957 the communist Russians beat us with the first man-made orbiting satellite called Sputnik. It scared us. It galvanized us. It mobilized us.

It led us to embrace a "new frontier" into which we would follow a vigorous young president who challenged us to get to the moon by the end of the decade, which we did. Partisanship did not end for JFK and the country with that challenge. Nor did ugliness and human horror. But he dared to reach for, and may have been starting to achieve, a kind of partisan transcendence.

So it was that Obama, another vigorous young president, came out to address the Congress and the nation.

He came armed with his new Sputnik. It was China, beating us in the classroom and the factory while building the world's fastest computer and a faster train.

He came armed with his new challenge: It was to focus on and spur our proud and storied tradition of world-changing innovation, the kind that still dominates the digital information age with Google and Facebook. It was to make our schools better and reinvent our decaying industries through a renewal of our traditional dominance of research and development and technological advancement.

He challenged us to construct an entirely new and cleaner system of energy production and energy consumption and to create jobs galore and make money galore as we do it.

It comes down to this: What happened to Obama over the past two years was that he seemed obsessed with his party's history from 1948, when Harry Truman was the first Democrat to push for universal health care, rather than with his own moment, 2009 and 2010, when the great American concern was fear of a lost competitive position in the world, primarily, but not exclusively, to China.

As Al From of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council always said: FDR succeeded with programs, but modern Democrats, while needing to do the same, required new programs, not FDR's.

Obama seems to get it now. He has a chance to fare better if he can devote himself to leading America in 2011 rather than leading Democrats from 1948.

John Brummett, an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock, is author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.