There was no moment like that in this address, although the sight of Obama embracing Giffords conveyed genuine joy, and that of an Arizona Republican, Jeff Flake, helping her stand up to cheer for him, real friendship. Perhaps there couldn’t be; a State of the Union is more of a ritual. And yet Giffords and other women at the speech, both legislators and guests, provided some of its most arresting, and challenging, moments.
Sometimes a person can become a symbol without ever being seen. “Warren Buffett’s secretary” is a phrase that sounds like it was made up by an economics-textbook writer, to illustrate a point—the tax-policy version of “Shakespeare’s sister.” But Debbie Bosanek was always a real person. Buffett didn’t make her up; nor did he invent the reason he began talking about her. As he wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times last year (with the evocative title “Stop Coddling the Super Rich”), “what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income—and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other twenty people in our office.” Last night Obama said,
Right now … a quarter of all millionaires pay lower tax rates than millions of middle-class households. Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Bosanek was sitting in the First Lady’s box, which meant that the camera had somewhere to look other than at John Boehner (skeptical, with a polka-dot tie) or Joe Biden (fidgeting, with a striped tie). Bosanek, in a dark red jacket that matched the frames of her glasses, tilted her head and gently nodded. She also—and the White House, when it issued the invitation, probably had a pretty good sense of this—pays a greater share of her income in taxes than Mitt Romney does. (In 2010, Romney paid 13.9 per cent—less than Buffett.) She told the Washington Post that she follows Buffett’s lead on tax policies, but didn’t want to get into her political views. (“I never discuss that.”) She did say that, in being at the State of the Union, “I feel like I’m representing secretaries everywhere.” Newt Gingrich, in a speech a few hours before the State of the Union, spoke mockingly about somewhere called “Planet Obama.” (All that talk of Mars in Monday night’s debate may have got to him.) But Bosanek lives in a place that many of us would simply call the real world.
Other guests in the First Lady’s box were members of the military or military spouses or, in one case, both. (That guest was Sergeant Ashleigh Berg; she has served two tours in Iraq, and her husband, Sergeant Matthew Berg, is on his third tour in Afghanistan.) Their lives told a series of stories: that soldiers, like secretaries, are not abstractions; that wars are never distant things that can just be fought in a faraway place and left there; and that the military as much as the civilian sphere is a place where our values can be embraced and realized, rather than abandoned. As he closed his speech, Obama said,
When you put on that uniform, it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white; Asian, Latino, Native American; conservative, liberal; rich, poor; gay, straight. When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you, or the mission fails. When you’re in the thick of the fight, you rise or fall as one unit, serving one nation, leaving no one behind.
Obama, who, three years ago, invited all of the surviving Tuskegee Airmen to his inauguration, knows that the uniform has not always been quite such a magic cloak, even as the military can and has been a transformative civic classroom. (Last week, Obama also hosted a screening of “Red Tails,” George Lucas’s new movie about the Tuskegee Airmen, which deals with the discrimination they faced as black pilots in the Second World War.) We are getting better, and sometimes soldiers get there first. One particular woman sitting with Michelle Obama helped keep the President’s peroration from sinking too far into metaphor: Colonel Ginger Wallace. She has been in the Air Force for twenty years. She is a lesbian whose partner, thanks to the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, was able to take part in her promotion ceremony in December.
It is a moral and political victory that Colonel Wallace and other members of the military can now serve their country without having to lie; for years we had been asking service members to be brave, and then giving them, needlessly, reasons to be afraid—exposed to battle, wary of exposure. Colonel Wallace could not be more visible now. It would be blind to say she is safe—she is heading to Afghanistan soon—but at least she does not need to hide. And yet her story also suggests some uncompleted work: when can her partner have the option of being a military spouse? It is one thing to take part in a promotion ceremony; it is another to have the legal protections and recognition that comes with marriage. Who needs that more than soldiers, who too often may need to know that someone they love has unquestioned right to a hospital room, or to be the one who gets bad news? Who deserves it more?
President Obama tried to make the story of the assault that killed Osama bin Laden a metaphor for the way the members of a society depend on each other:
You can’t charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there’s somebody behind you, watching your back. So it is with America…. This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other’s backs.
Those words echo a theme that Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard professor who helped conceive of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has repeated in her speeches: that no one succeeds entirely on his or her own, detached from our web of mutual obligation. Warren is running for the Senate in Massachusetts. Perhaps, for next year’s State of the Union, she will be another woman in the room.
Original Article
Source: New Yorker
Author: Amy Davidson
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