As President Barack Obama walked down the Congressional aisle after delivering his final State of the Union Address, Santa Barbara Congressmember Lois Capps reached out, shook his hand, and said, “Mr. President, you and I are leaving this place together. He said, ‘I know that.’” For Obama, it was his eighth State of the Union speech; for Capps, it would be her 18th and her last. “This was very emotional for me,” Capps said. “It was rather poignant.”
It became especially so, she said, as Obama spoke of the need to change the way politics is conducted in the United States and re-establishing “bonds of trust” in an atmosphere defined by hyper-partisanship. “That was the phrase Walter used — ‘bonds of trust,’” Capps said, speaking of her deceased husband, Walter Capps, whose Congressional seat she assumed in 1997 after he died of a sudden heart attack. “Man, that took my breath away to hear the President talk that way.”
Congress was bitterly divided along partisan lines, Capps said, when she first took office. “But it wasn’t half as partisan as it is now.” In his address, Obama appealed to the “voices of unarmed truth and unconditional love,” a phrase he borrowed from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., to reduce the rancor and noise of American political discourse. When Americans learn to conduct politics in a less polarized fashion, anything, he said — a cure for cancer, an end to climate change, even campaign finance reform — is possible. To do otherwise, he contended, would be to “forsake a better future” and allow an even greater consolidation of great wealth and power.