The rap against President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday was that his agenda, once ambitious and transformational, has suddenly turned modest. Instead of grand bargains and sweeping change, the president proposed holding a summit meeting on working families and extracting a promise from colleges to admit more low-income students — not exactly sweeping solutions to middle-class stagnation and college debt. What happened to the visionary politician who promised that his inauguration would mark the moment the rise of the oceans began to slow?
State of the Union: Obama aims lower in an era of limits