Economy
The Urban Message Missing From the State of the Union
The issues facing the nation's cities were largely ignored in the president’s speech
It feels like far more than a year ago when, in the 2011 version of his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama pledged that “[w]ithin 25 years, our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.”
I suppose that dream hasn’t totally died (yet), but it's certainly a less vibrant one than it was just a year ago. In last night's 2012 speech, Obama didn't bring up anything remotely so ambitious. As in previous years, the president spoke of the crucial need to fix our “crumbling” infrastructure. He vaguely called for “a broader agenda to repair America's infrastructure.”