After the worst year of his presidency, marked by a government shutdown and the botched rollout of healthcare reform, President Barack Obama declared this week in his fifth State of the Union address that 2014 must be a year of action. He told a divided Congress that, if it failed to take action on key issues, he would bypass it and use executive action instead. For all his fighting talk, however, the president's capacity for action in domestic policy is becoming ever more constrained as this year's mid-term elections approach, threatening to weaken Democrats still further in Congress and hasten his presidency's descent into its lame-duck phase.
Eloquent as ever, Mr Obama spoke at length on the twin economic issues at the top of the American political agenda, income inequality and stalling social mobility, noting that top earners have never done better while middle-income families are struggling to get by. Without the help of Congress, however, there is little the president can do to reverse this trend and the initiatives he announced – a minimum wage increase for workers on new federal contracts and the introduction of “starter savings accounts” to help people save for retirement – will have only a limited impact. The president’s relations with congressional Republicans are so difficult that he said almost nothing about immigration reform, the sole major policy area where a bipartisan compromise looks possible, in case he frightened off potential allies across the aisle.
The president was more forthright on foreign policy, defending his administration's negotiations with Iran on its nuclear programme and threatening to veto any fresh sanctions Congress attempts to impose on Tehran. Here too, the limits of his scope for effective action became clear when he called yet again for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention centre but acknowledged that he could only fulfil the promise he made about the camp on his first day in office if Congress lifts remaining restrictions on transferring detainees.