President Barack Obama didn’t mention college sexual assault during his State of the Union address Tuesday, an issue his administration has highlighted.
In an address that largely focused on economic issues, Obama chose to discuss higher education issues like the cost of a college degree, his free community college plan and simplifying the process of applying for federal financial aid.
The president skipped the chance to address college sexual violence as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) brought as her guest Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, who has been outspoken in criticizing her school after she reported being raped.
Sulkowicz became a well-known campus rape activist thanks to her senior thesis, titled “Carry That Weight,” in which she promised to drag her mattress around campus until the man that she and two other Columbia students have accused of sexual assault is removed from the school.
“We appreciate the administration’s commitment to this issue, but it was a missed opportunity to talk about not just making colleges more affordable, but also safer,” said Gillibrand spokesman Glen Caplin.
The president was busy with the issue in 2014. He started the first White House task force, pressuring universities to improve their response to reports of rape, enlisting celebrities and major organizations like the NCAA to assist. His Education Department launched investigations into how colleges handle sexual violence, though much of this was driven by student activism.
“The president touched on many important issues in his address,” said Annie Clark, co-founder of End Rape on Campus and a leading activist who helped focus White House attention on the topic. “However, this administration has been the most active in American history on the issue of college sexual assault, so it’s disappointing Obama didn’t even mention campus rape in his address.”
There is no record of a president mentioning sexual assault during a State of the Union address.
In past State of the Union addresses, including last year’s, Obama skipped the issue of military sexual assault. He did so as an intense debate over competing Democratic Senate bills to reform how the military handles rape cases, and as lawmakers brought veterans and survivors to the presidential address.
President Barack Obama enjoyed a warm embrace with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Tuesday, as the commander in chief made his way into the House chamber to deliver the State of the Union.
Read more here.
HuffPost’s Tyler Kingkade reports:
President Barack Obama didn’t mention college sexual assault during his State of the Union address Tuesday, an issue his administration has highlighted.
In an address that largely focused on economic issues, Obama chose to discuss higher education issues like the cost of a college degree, his free community college plan and simplifying the process of applying for federal financial aid.
The president skipped the chance to address college sexual violence as Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) brought as her guest Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, who has been outspoken in criticizing her school after she reported being raped.
Read more here.
On HuffPost Live, Howard Fineman and Zach Carter discuss President Barack Obama’s best joke from the State of the Union address.
HuffPost’s Sara Bondioli reports:
Rep. Curt Clawson (R-Fla.) delivered the tea party response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday, focusing on personal liberty and teamwork — along with a lengthy story about his college basketball career.
“President Obama just presented his proposals for America — pretty much the same rhetoric we’ve heard for the past six years. I’m not here to pick apart his ideas one by one — but to offer a very different vision for our nation,” Clawson said, according to prepared remarks.
Read the full story here.
Pfeiffer explained the White House’s thinking about releasing Obama’s remarks as prepared for delivery on Medium and rolling out Obama’s SOTU ideas weeks before the big speech.
“I do think the old way of doing it was obsolete,” Pfeiffer said, saying the White House takes pleasure in taking old methods of rolling out information and doing them differently.
“One of the things that is like the tradition of the State of the Union is, you go out, you give your speech and then you barnstorm the country… what we’ve learned is every year, the press attention… the conversation in the country… would get shorter after State of the Union,” Pfeiffer said, explaining why Obama went on a pre-SOTU tour explaining his talking points.
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The man in charge of keeping House Democratic votes in line isn’t holding out hope that Republicans will actually cooperate with President Barack Obama.
House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said during an interview ahead of Tuesday night’s State of the Union address that it’s important for Obama to strike a conciliatory tone, but he’s seen little to suggest that Republicans plan to use their majority in both houses of Congress to find areas of common ground.
“The Republicans continue to send messages to their most conservative wing,” Hoyer told HuffPost Live. “If that’s all they’re going to do, we’re not going to go forward very quickly or very successfully.”
Read more here.
HuffPost’s Mike McAuliff reports:
President Barack Obama may have a strong message for the middle class and voters in his State of the Union address, but it won’t matter unless he and Congress first do something about the cash-flooded election system, Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) argued Tuesday.
[…]
Five years after the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Citizens United case that billionaires could spend as much money as they want on campaigns, Sarbanes wants to create a public finance system in which people get a small tax credit for political donations, which would then be matched six times over with public money.
“That means a donor is now worth 0 to the candidate,” Sarbanes said, arguing that a politician would then have incentives to visit people in living rooms, rather than catering to super PACs and billionaires. “It’s worth my going there instead of going to K Street or getting on the phone with a bunch of high-dollar donors.”
Read the full story here.
Last year's SOTU scored 33,299,172 viewers. (Nielsen only counts folks watching at home on TVs; no web streams.) This year: higher or lower?
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 21, 2015
RBG in the House. pic.twitter.com/gMhqO3e8L6
— Meredith Shiner (@meredithshiner) January 21, 2015
#SOTU is an important tradition in our shared political history, regardless of party. I’m watching tonight. Are you? http://t.co/Ehs0oBecis
— Madeleine Albright (@madeleine) January 21, 2015
President Barack Obama will be donning his now-infamous tan suit this evening, according to senior White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer.
The President's suiting up for the big speech. Tune into http://t.co/tmsUd5yh5y at 9pm ET #YesWeTan pic.twitter.com/FC8sKb8hda
— Dan Pfeiffer (@pfeiffer44) January 21, 2015
Back in August, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) went on a fairly extensive rant about the president’s attire. The interview was flagged by BuzzFeed:
“There’s no way any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday,” King said of President Obama on NewsMaxTV. “When you have the world watching… a week, two weeks of anticipation of what the United States is gonna do. For him to walk out — I’m not trying to be trivial here — in a light suit, light tan suit, saying that first he wants to talk about what most Americans care about the revision of second quarter numbers on the economy. This is a week after Jim Foley was beheaded and he’s trying to act like real Americans care about the economy, not about ISIS and not about terrorism. And then he goes on to say he has no strategy.”
Middle-class economics and ISIS, the issues King highlighted, are on the agenda for tonight’s the State of the Union address. Will Rep. King give us another glorious rant about the president’s fashion sense this evening?
UPDATE: Pfeiffer was trolling us. Obama is wearing a black suit.
— Julia Craven
