President Obama’s chief of staff and the top Senate Republican squared off indirectly on Sunday morning talk shows, laying out competing visions for Obama’s final State of the Union this week.
In the address, scheduled for Tuesday night, Obama won’t give “your typical policy speech” that ticks off goals for the coming year, White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Instead, the speech will take a more visionary tone, as Obama outlines how he’d like to see the country move forward after he leaves office next year.
“What he wants to do on Tuesday is talk about the kind of country he hopes it will be over the next 20 years,” McDonough said.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said he wants Obama to offer a clearer plan to defeat the Islamic State. Obama has responded to its the terror group’s aggressions in Iraq and Syria with airstrikes but not forces on the ground.
“I’d like to see the president step up here in this last year and lay out a plan for the defeat of ISIL,” McConnell said, said using a common acronym for the group.
McConnell said that in the coming year, he’d like to see Congress pass every appropriations bill through what’s known as “regular order” — a feat lawmakers haven’t fully accomplished since 1994.
“That would be noteworthy and hasn’t happened in two decades,” McConnell said.
