Obama: I'll Act To Restore The Fading American Dream
SAHIL KAPUR – JANUARY 28, 2014, 10:20 PM EST
Underlying the optimistic rhetoric of President Barack Obama's annual State of the Union speech was a palpable fear about the fading American dream -- an uneasy concoction of eagerness to solve the problems plaguing America and a masked fatalism about the Republican blockade of his agenda.
But he morphed the fatalism into hopefulness, vowing that if they refuse to work with him, he'll do everything he can to take action on his own.
The American ideal of work hard, get ahead has "suffered some serious blows," Obama said before a packed House chamber of legislators, cabinet officials and other guests on Tuesday night. Indeed, surging income inequality has cast a dark cloud over Americans at the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and social mobility has flatlined in the last decade.
"Today, after four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better. But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled," the president said. "The cold, hard fact is that even in the midst of recovery, too many Americans are working more than ever just to get by – let alone get ahead. And too many still aren’t working at all. Our job is to reverse these tides."
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