Finding "rural" in the State of the Union speech

President Obama's State of the Union address had a number of rural implications, but maybe the biggest one is that the rest of the country is acting more like rural America. "We’re all rural now," Bill Bishop of the Daily Yonder writes. "That was the message I got out of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address." (White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The presidented described the transition from an economy where you went to the factory and got a "job for life, with a decent paycheck, good benefits, and the occasional promotion," to one where steel mills that once employed 1,000 now only employs 100. Obama was describing a phenomenon all too familiar to rural America, Bishop writes. Bishop points to the agriculture economy transition 100 years ago that allowed farms to produce more with fewer workers and "left rural America behind, in a sense." Bishop concludes, "Rural America’s problem of adjusting to a new economy over the last century is now the nation’s challenge."

Bishop's reaction was the first of eight Yonder contributors included in the article. Former Congressional staffer Claiborn Crain noted Obama wasn't technologically neutral in referring to wireless Internet as a path to universal broadband access. Crain pointed out that the president did not talk about bio-energy. Dee Davis of the Center for Rural Strategies was pleasantly surprised by the number of rural references in the speech, giving particular notice to the pledge to bring broadband access to 98 percent of Americans. Missouri farmer Richard Oswald also notes that ethanol didn't make it into the speech and wondered if Obama's talk of decreasing regulation would hurt the push for competition in the agriculture industry. (Read more)