Manzi does a close reading of the SOTU
There are only two possibilities: either he is basically right that that lack of fidelity to the public good by the political class is why he can’t get his policy proposals implemented into law, or he is not. If he is right, then asking everybody to play nice won’t, by definition, fix the problem. Proposing procedural reforms to lobbying and so forth (as the president did) won’t fix it, because such a political class would simply make sure that such reforms were Potemkin affairs that did nothing to address the root problem. If he is trying to go over the heads of Congress, and shame them in front of the American people, he has not come close to the depth, intensity and repetition of the criticisms he would need to make such a strategy work. But if is he is not right, then he has misidentified the problem. Either way he is stuck without a proposed course of action – which is where, at least in this speech, I think he found himself.
I think he's right about the political class and I agree it makes things very very hard. All he has done so far in this respect is to remind voters that he gets their frustration with the Beltway mentality. Today's Baltimore effort was more in that vein. It was civil but real contact sport on the key issues and the central fact of GOP obstructionism.
Fallows provides his annual annotation of the speech.
The Dish 