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BILL SCHNEIDER
A speech about fairness is bound to be divisive. Mitt Romney figured that out. In a "prebuttal" delivered hours before President Barack Obama's spoke on Tuesday night, Romney said, "It is shameful for a president to use the State of the Union to divide our nation."
There was only one problem. He didn't. The president did talk about fairness. He even demanded that millionaires pay higher taxes. But he found a way to do it that wasn't divisive. He used the image of all Americans fighting together as a team.
"Those of us who've been sent here to serve can learn from the service of our troops," the President said to a bitterly divided Congress. "When you put on that uniform, it doesn't matter if you're black or white; Asian or Latino; conservative or liberal; rich or poor; gay or straight."
It's an image from those old war movies that featured fastidiously balanced fighter squadrons -- one Italian-American, one Jew, one Latino, one Southern good ole boy, one fast-talking New Yorker, one Midwestern farm boy and, if the director was especially bold, one African-American Think "Destination Tokyo" (1943) or "Battleground" (1949).
The president used the example of the SEAL team raid that killed Osama bin Laden: "The mission only succeeded," Obama said, "because every member of that unit trusted each other -- because you can't charge up those stairs. into darkness and danger, unless you know that there's someone behind you, watching your back... . We get each other's backs."
O.K., we get it. We fight as a team. But what are we fighting for? Answer: We're fighting for fairness - "an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share and everyone plays by the same set of rules."
O.K., but are we fighting? It only works if there's an enemy. The enemy was clear enough in World War II. The president praised what we now call "the greatest generation" that "triumphed over a depression and fascism." Interesting -- a domestic enemy and a foreign enemy.
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