From Bob Kuttner, The Politics of Gesture:

Among the measures [Pres. Obama proposed which require] legislation is a tax plan that would increase taxes on the wealthiest in order to finance the tuition help for community college students and more generous child tax credits for working families. Obama also wants an excise tax on large banks and he is calling on Congress to pass a law giving all workers seven days of annual sick leave….

[Pres. Obama’s] initiatives are welcome. It probably sounds churlish to say that measures such as [he proposed] should have come much earlier in his presidency, and could have been a lot stronger.

The measures Pres. Obama proposed in his SOTU address should have come much earlier in his presidency, and could have been a lot stronger.  Back to Mr. Kuttner (emphasis mine):

Late in the game, when there is no risk that his proposals will be enacted, Obama is belatedly pursuing policies that seek to underscore the differences between Democrats and Republicans in terms of the practical situation of regular people…

The time to have fought for such policies was when Obama still had a majority in Congress. But back then, in 2010, he was promoting deficit reduction.

And there are two deeper problems. None of Obama’s proposals will fundamentally change the distribution of wealth and power in America. None addresses the structural erosion of decent payroll jobs.

With one hand, the administration proposes some useful, if marginal, help to working families. With the other, it is promoting trade deals such as the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), both of which will increase the power of corporations to weaken health, safety, labor and environmental regulations and increase the outsourcing of jobs….

Meanwhile, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act is slowly being eviscerated, by the administration’s glacial pace of issuing regulations, now compounded by the Republican strategy of dismantling the financial reform law through successive amendments to must-pass legislation. Wall Street profits are more lucrative than ever, too-big-to-fail banks are even bigger, and there is no fundamental change to the business model that further enriches the one percent and that crashed the economy in 2008.

The White House policy of business-as-usual for Wall Street plus marginally increased help for working families calls to mind a very useful British expression—”horse and rabbit stew,” a supposedly equal ragout made from one horse and one rabbit.

When you add it all up, it still amounts to Rubinism, the ideology associated with America’s most influential Wall Street Democrat, Robert Rubin. The former Goldman Sachs co-chair, later chair of the executive committee of Citigroup—with a stint as Clinton economic policy czar and later treasury secretary in between—had a neat formula for serving the interests of Wall Street while signaling concern for America’s struggling working families.

The policy was one part financial deregulation and trade deals crafted to enable banks and corporations to outrun the constraints of domestic law. The other part was small-bore initiatives to signal help for ordinary working families. Such proposals are unobjectionable, except for the fact that they don’t fundamentally change the political economy of American inequality….

Thanks to the historic accident of the date of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birth, MLK Day will forever be on the eve of the president’s State of the Union address. Dr. King’s courage in fighting not just for racial inclusion but for economic justice should shame Democrats who invoke King’s words but not his sense of mission and struggle.

William Rivers Pitt provides a less charitable characterization of Pres. Obama’s speech, Twenty Pounds of BS in a Ten-Pound Bag.  Please read it.