Was it a speech for the ages? No. State of the union addresses rarely are.
They're checklists, salted with rhetoric because speeches have to be. They're not written to be chiselled onto obelisks, but to serve a purpose. Barack Obama's was to put him on the side of the future and make the Republicans look stuck in the past.
The world has changed, he kept saying. We've been No 1 economically, but we all fear that could change, and it will, unless we make the investments I'm suggesting. That resonates on Main Street, because there is no Main Street in today's America that doesn't feel global tremors.
It's a theme Obama surely plans to carry through to the 2012 election campaign. So he did fine, but more importantly, he's getting lots of help from the Republicans, because while Obama is trying to talk to middle America, they are talking only to their base.
They want budget cuts most Americans won't support. The 50 states, all in fiscal distress, need every federal dollar they can get, which means Republican governors and mayors are going to look over congressional Republicans' proposed cuts to programmes they depend on and ask, "what are you people thinking?"
Here, the rubber of Tea Party euphoria meets the road of grinding out policy, and the results are laughable. Hours before Obama's speech, new Kentucky GOP Senator Rand Paul, a Tea Party poster boy, released his own budget for fiscal year 2011. His $500bn in cuts would reduce homeland security spending by 43%, interior (parks, public land) by 78%, federal courts by 32% and so on. That's a joke.
Even less radical Republicans are talking numbers that just won't work. They want to go back to 2008 levels, which would mean 22% cuts in domestic spending, and that is impossible.
Republicans have confused the results of last November's election, in which their base turned out in arge numbers and others didn't bother, with the will of the American people. The GOP has staked out a position that can't win. If Obama can keep ownership of rhetoric about the future, the future should be his.
