America’s disaffection with its government runs deep

For all the numbers that will be bandied around by Barack Obama during his annual State of the Union address today, one of the most revealing — the television ratings — will be published the morning after. Obama’s fifth State of the Union will focus on inequality and the cost of living crisis that is uppermost in the minds of millions of ordinary Americans, but if the trend of recent years continues, fewer than ever will bother to tune in.

The increasingly flaccid viewing figures — from 52.3 million in 2009 down to 33.3 million last year — reflect the ebbing of Obama’s personal star power and the reality of his political impotence since losing control of Congress in 2010. With presidential prospects for 2016 already exerting magnetic pull over the political conversation and Congress fixated on the forthcoming mid-term elections, this year’s speech will be much more a wish-list than a “to-do” list. Obama will expound on America’s great predicament: Over the past 20 years, the cost of maintaining the four pillars of a middle class life — housing, education, health care and retirement — have increased far more sharply than wages. It has been promised that Obama will “stake a beachhead for middle-class economic security”, but both he and his audience know he has little or no chance of turning requests for universal child care, a living wage and immigration reform into reality. Such are the hard facts of divided government and second-term presidents.

However, the American public’s disaffection with their government runs far deeper than simply being turned off by Obama’s fading celebrity. His falling numbers also speak to a broader disengagement with politicians as agents of change. Two stories last week illustrate why more than 80 per cent of Americans have simply given up on Congress and their political classes, who seem to prosper like never before at a time when (to quote Obama) the American dream is under “fundamental threat”. The indictment of Bob McDonnell, a former Republican governor of Virginia, and his wife Maureen on corruption charges confirmed every public prejudice about the grubbiness that apparently goes with political office. In exchange for a seat at the governor’s table, they are accused of demanding iPhones, engraved Rolex watches, pairs of $500 (Dh1,839) Louis Vuitton shoes and $10,000 shopping trips to New York to keep the governor’s wife in the style to which she believed she should become accustomed.

Representative or not, the 43-page indictment echoed public distrust in members of a political class who wring their hands over the fate of the middle classes and the need for more and better jobs, while writing histrionic emails about how they cannot afford a new dress for the inauguration ball. Less noticed because it was less salacious, but ultimately more revealing, was a study released by the Sunlight Foundation transparency watchdog into how the “revolving door” between Congress, government and the lobby shops is spinning faster and more lucratively than ever.

As Obama’s own first-term advisers desert him for the private sector, the study calculated that revenues earned by lobbyists with “previous government experience” had risen more than fourfold since 1998. While middle-class incomes stagnate, being on the inside has never paid better. Of course it was Obama who promised a new kind of politics of “hope and change”. But after an aggressive start that included his health care reforms, he now manages only a kind of distracted despair at Congress’s short-sightedness. So with his numbers in the doldrums, he has promised a “year of action” in which he will try to circumvent the roadblock in Congress by signing executive orders to fix things around the edges, a strategy that serves only to highlight his weakness.

As Obama will wearily declare, there are no magic cures for what ails America’s middle classes, but — worse for those who bother to tune in — there will be precious little he can do to reassure them that a foundation for a brighter future is being laid.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014