For a country deeply divided by party affiliation, job title, religion, and even ethnicity these days, President Bush's last State of the Union Address produced a fairly uniform response from pundits, politicians and the public: change is coming, and not a moment too soon.
The message couldn't have been clearer from where I sat on Monday night, surrounded by several SEIU members, including two child care providers, a janitor, a security officer, and a hospital technician/MPA. Watching Bush's seventh and final SOTU, we were prepared to hear anything. What we did hear left us cold. I think we shared the sentiment of working families all around this country, who were neither surprised nor impressed to hear the lip service the president paid to what are pocketbook issues for most of us: child care, utility bills, housing and healthcare.
Gloria Knight, a 50 year-old child care provider with SEIU Local 500 Kids First Maryland, summed it up best: "Did he talk about the things that matter to me? Well, housing, wages, healthcare--I heard him mention them, but I didn't hear solutions. He gets you all hyped up, but then he leaves you hanging."
You see, from where Gloria, and SEIU members Annette Scurry, Kevin Hills, Leonard Green, and Raquel Mack sit, this country is out of balance and we need a lot more than empty promises if we're going to put it back on course. Gas prices have nearly tripled, the annual cost of a family health insurance premium has gone up by more than $3,800, families are losing their homes, and more Americans live in poverty than ever before. Since the president came into office in 2001, the median household income in this country has decreased by $1,100. At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor has reached an all time high; in 2007, the salary of a full-time minimum wage employee without vacation was $12,168 while the average salary of a CEO of a Fortune 500 company surpassed $15 million.
But the president didn't focus on these realities.
On healthcare reform, president Bush talked about giving healthcare workers more freedom to do their jobs, but offered no solutions for how to help the more than 47 million uninsured Americans who have to pray that they won't get sick every day. "He talked about making healthcare more 'affordable'--whatever that means," said Annette, a family child care provider and leader in SEIU Local 500 Kids First Maryland. "But he didn't talk about the SCHIP bill he vetoed last year. He didn't talk about healthcare for kids at all. I just don't think it interests him."
On energy, he talked about how we should wean ourselves off of foreign oil, but he failed to mention how this dependency led us to a deplorable war--or how the increasing costs of oil enrich his friends in the oil industry. For Annette, the concerns are more immediate: "I need the gas to keep my child care center warm enough for the kids, and if it's not warm enough, they'll come in and shut down my facility. But I don't get extra money to pay for the more expensive gas. Already it takes my income and my husband's both to heat the house. I don't know what I'll do if the prices keep going up."
The president talked about job creation, but he didn't say where the jobs were or whether they'd really support a family. In our discussion, we gave the president lots of credit for mentioning how the rising cost of living hurts working families, but his solution--more tax cuts for the rich--didn't sound promising to ordinary working folks like SEIU Local 32BJ's Raquel Mack, a security guard for Allied Barton Security on K Street. Despite working two jobs, she can't make enough money to pay for her son's child care. And her constant worry over the sorry state of her child's public school in the District was not assuaged by the president's celebration of "leaving no child behind."
Of course the president reserved over half of the speech to talk about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the future threat of a war in Iran. But we all know that he left out most of that story. "He didn't say anything about how we've been spending our dwindling budget on a war without an end," said Kevin Hills, a janitor for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and member of SEIU Local 32BJ. "I didn't hear him talk about how the American people are being fleeced."
Indeed, it was a sobering night to be reminded of just where our country has come these past seven years. But in our little watch party, there was a glimmer of hope. "I will tell him this," Kevin said to us all at the end of the night. "The fight starts now. We're going to begin by knocking on doors; talking to our fellow members; and making sure we use all the energy possible to make a real change in our country in 2009."
Long before the president started talking about a weakening economy, the core of our country's workforce--the engine of our country's prosperity--knew that we were running out of steam. And long before this campaign season began to heat up, these same workers started making plans to regain it. Thanks to working people like Kevin, I know that there is real hope in the future. There is real hope in change. And there is real hope in November 2008.