Offer an action plan, not just a vision

The truth is, the President is only entering this debate at all because he can no longer ignore the growing bipartisan calls for action. If he were serious, he’d be talking about a detailed roadmap for action, not just grabbing headlines by announcing another speech.

Of course, we can hope that the President presents more than just his vision for the future this afternoon. But those who’ve hoped for that from this president have been disappointed many times before. What we’re likely to get instead is a broad-brush notion of what the President wants to see — a vision that includes calls for strengthening entitlement programs that few people would disagree with but which will never come about absent Presidential leadership; a partisan call for tax hikes on struggling job creators; and, I fear, a call for tax hikes on energy producers when gas prices are already creating heavy burdens for so many.

No doubt we’ll also get a fair share of finger-pointing, and an attempt to cast Republicans in the worst possible light for actually laying out a serious plan to address the crises we face while others merely talk about their vision. But we can still hope that the President leaves the scapegoating aside for a change, and finally admits the obvious: that we can only solve these fiscal crises if we do so together.

So either the President agrees today that Republicans have a point when it comes to the seriousness of our fiscal problems and admits that the old approach of pretending they don’t exist won’t work anymore, or those problems will become harder and harder to solve. Either he pretends that old programs, unlike everything else in life, don’t need to adapt to survive, or he joins us in acknowledging those programs will no longer be there for the people who are counting on them if we don’t take serious action now.

We need to keep our promises to seniors and to a rising generation of Americans — and we will — but we can no longer afford to make promises to younger workers that we all know we cannot afford to keep.

Look: if big government created jobs and opportunity, then we’d be in the middle of a boom right now. That experiment has failed. And that’s why the national conversation has shifted from how much Democrats want to expand the scope of government to how much both parties should rein it in.

The fiscal crisis we face won’t be solved by ‘freezing’ unsustainable government spending, or by raising taxes on the very small businesses we are counting on to create jobs. And the programs we cherish as Americans won’t be preserved for the next generation through speeches alone. Americans don’t want to hear the President’s vision today — he’s had two years to lay that out. They want to hear his plan. 

Americans don’t want to hear the President criticize or distort the serious efforts of those in our party who want to solve our problems head on. They want to hear a detailed counter-proposal of his own. And they don’t want to hear that the price of gas at the pump is going to get even higher, or that their opportunities to find or create jobs will shrink. Now is not a time for mere speeches or political attacks. It’s a time for action.

That’s what Americans want from this President. That’s what they’re failing to get. I hope that changes today.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is the Senate minority leader.