THE IRRITATED AMERICAN What, me worry? The President during a candid moment before the 2015 State Of The Union address. (File Photo) President Obama did his best to appear to be taking the country by the bootstraps last night in an effort to reinvigorate his leadership during a final two year stretch that is the very core and essence of the Lame Duck scenario. Being a lame duck is bad enough, even when your party holds power in either or both wings of the Congress. Even with a party majority, the President is typically sidelined by his cohorts, who are classically too busy preparing for the next election cycle to concern themselves with the goings-on of a political corpse who has not yet decided to go cold and take a trip to the morgue. But with the opposing party controlling both the house and the senate, we are talking rigor mortis par excellence--political weakness on a gargantuan scale. A president riding out the remainder of his term under this scenario typically has nowhere to go but quietly into the history books, towards library planning, towards memoir collection, towards recollection of those fantastic days when he said "jump" and the entire population of the planet was already six inches off the ground. Barack Obama will not, it seems, acquiesce to the trappings of this syndrome: he is determined to leverage any and all power he can rustle up--snuggling up to Republicans, sharpening the veto dagger, putting together complex give and takes that play both ends against the middle class--to keep himself in the game. One of the smartest investments in the future of the American people is his plan to make two years of community college free for all. Nothing could be better for the middle and lower classes right now. I've already written about the disaster that job exporting (to cheap labor markets like Mexico and China) has wrought on the dignity of the middle-skill job market. So many millions of dignified, unionized blue collar jobs that kept my father's generation firmly enmeshed in the American dream--a house, a car, a well fed family, all on one man's salary--have disappeared with no replacement. What does a thirty or forty something individual who once worked in manufacturing in the midwest do when he and thousands of others are thrown out of work. Nowadays, college is the only answer to for those caught in midstream to suddenly find themselves irrelevant. They can't create jobs for which they are qualified when they have all flown across the ocean to another hemisphere . . . but they can create qualifications within themselves by pursuing education. The only alternative is working more than one job in chain stores or restaurants, for minimum wage and/or tips. There is no way that Mr. Obama's Community College plan can be anything but a good thing for America, it's economy, and it's middle and lower classes. Let's see what the coming year unfolds. Preston Clive 1/21/201