ABSTRACT
The year 2011 in American politics opened with a lacklustre State of Union speech delivered by an unpopular President who was the quintessential product of the post-modern age. Narrowly elected in 2008 because of the shock effect of the Global Financial Crisis, Barack Obama spent two years attempting unsuccessfully a re-tread of the 1930s New Deal. An $800 billion economic spending stimulus failed to reverse high unemployment. The federal government funded short-term public sector jobs, principally at state and local level, expecting demand to grow, the economy to grow and jobs to grow. They did not. Instead the nation’s fiscal deficit ballooned. The President and Congress then committed the country long term to hundreds of billions of additional deficit spending on health care entitlements. The electorate’s judgement was swift and unambiguous. The President’s party, the Democrats, lost heavily in the mid-term Congressional elections. President Obama’s response to the electoral verdict was not to roll back deficit or entitlement spending but rather to advocate further public investment, this time in research and technology (The White House 2011).
