Give President Obama this. He’s coming into a solidly Republican state today — one that earlier this week was proclaimed the State of the Year for economic development by Business Facilities magazine — supposedly in order to praise a higher education plan put into place by the state’s Republican governor and to tout a private-public partnership in manufacturing innovation in East Tennessee.
The Democratic president will be accompanied by one Republican U.S. senator who rightly has called his foreign policy “a day late and a dollar short,” by another Republican U.S. senator who said “Obamacare is a failure” and “America’s drowning in debt” and by a Republican governor who hasn’t depended on the federal government for innovation.
Though Obama has been tone-deaf in his six years in office to common-sense solutions for improving the economy, to the unpopularity of his Affordable Care Act and to the dislike of his immigration policies, he has never held back from pushing his political agenda.
How he’ll incorporate that agenda into today’s visit is not known, but imagine what he might do with his bully pulpit if his final two years in office were centered around efforts to find real solutions to the important issues of the day.
Instead of Obama conducting a war on coal as he threatened even when he was candidate Obama and since has followed through on, imagine if he came to Tennessee to talk about — for his last two years — the importance of an energy policy that embraced clean coal technology but also promoted market-driven green energy technologies.
And rather than putting into place a carbon policy as he did this year that will eliminate jobs and raise heating fuel costs on the people he claims to most want to help, imagine if he talked about the employment of fracking in the state and the role it has played across the country in the substantial drop in gasoline prices.
Instead of the president attempting to make public education more Washington, D.C.-centric, imagine if he came to the Volunteer State to talk about the importance of letting local superintendents, principals and teachers make decisions on how best to teach and test their students.
And ponder the good if he embraced Sen. Lamar Alexander’s recently introduced bipartisan legislation that would simplify the process of applying for and receiving federal financial aid to attend college, allow the year-round use of Pell Grants, discourage overborrowing and simplify repayments.
But the biggest of those issues on which he could have an impact is race.
In Chattanooga, for instance, three people — all black — were shot to death in the first seven days of 2015, but the head of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People said the killings are a symptom of inequality. She further blamed recent Chattanooga violence on “disinvestment” in the black community and a lack of opportunities for blacks and said since tourism in Hamilton County is supposed to reach $1 billion this year, $333 million of that should go to the black community that is one-third of Chattanooga.
Such wrong-headed and empty rhetoric is not isolated to Chattanooga but has populated the airwaves following recent grand jury decisions in Missouri and New York. Unfortunately, it also has been echoed in the White House, where the race-baiting Rev. Al Sharpton has been a frequent guest.
But, imagine if Obama used his time in East Tennessee to talk about ending the culture of killing, about the importance of a good education, about the influence of a two-working-parent home life, and about the freedom found in personal responsibility, innovation, entrepreneurship and employment. And imagine if this had been a main thrust of his since taking office in 2009.
A presidential visit, no matter the party of the president, is a big event. That the present occupant of the White House will be accompanied on his visit today by Sens. Bob Corker and Lamar Alexander as well as Gov. Bill Haslam is a good thing. They don’t have to agree with him to welcome him to the state. But who better to bend his ear and to pique his mind while he’s here on how things might be different and how things that have worked well for Tennessee might work across the country.