State of the Union Advice

There's a lot of advice about what Obama should say in his State of the Union address. Most of it, I think, addresses the specific content. My main piece of advice is somewhat more meta. Basically, I think that what Obama needs to do in this SotU speech is to continue his theme of willingness to work with Republicans but unwillingness to go along with bad policy ideas. It's a theme that I thought he did a great job pushing in his immediate post-midterm press conference. The point continues to be that, while there is in fact vanishingly little policy where Obama and John Boehner can both agree, and therefore the likelihood of significant compromise is close to zero (and much lower than the chance of something like a government shutdown due to lack of compromise), the public wants compromise. Therefore, it is incumbent on Obama to make it clear that, when the ultimate compromise inevitable falls through, it wasn't his fault. So far he's doing fine on this: people are much more likely to think that Republicans will be too inflexible than that Obama will be. So he needs to continue to say, "Look, I get that there are serious challenges facing our nation, and I'm willing to work with anyone who wants to work to face those challenges. If Republicans are serious about facing our nation's challenges, I'll work with them. If they aren't, then I won't." Then, in all likelihood, his 2012 State of the Union address will be more like, "Look, I said I would cooperate if the Republicans got serious about addressing our nation's problems, but they weren't," and then he can get into attacking the Republicans on do-nothing-ness, obstruction, inflexibility, etc. grounds.

As to content, 1) don't talk about cutting Social Security. Ideally talk about ways to fix it so that it will never start running deficits, like changing the payroll tax cap; 2) this wouldn't be a bad time to come out in favor of gay marriage, I think. The moment when those favoring marriage per se are more okay with civil unions than those favoring civil unions are okay with marriage is, I think, passed; 3) if he's going to talk about innovation, emphasize energy innovation; 4) when talking about the deficit, try to get the public to realize that there's a difference between the long-term deficit and the short-term deficit, and that the latter is scarcely bad at all; 5) this wouldn't be a bad time to throw his weight behind a renewal of the assault weapons ban, support for which jumped nine points from '09 to right now (63% now support it). Also, he should tout the accomplishments of the 111th Congress. This is an appropriate time to do that, I think.