SOTU reactions

Barack Obama says:

Each year, as we watch the State of the Union, we see half the chamber rise to applaud the President and half the chamber stay in their seats. We see half the country tune in to watch, but know that much of the country has stopped even listening. Imagine if next year was different. Imagine if next year, the entire nation had a president they could believe in. A president who rallied all Americans around a common purpose. That’s the kind of President we need in this country. And with your help in the coming days and weeks, that’s the kind of President I will be.

And Ezra responds:

[T]he great question mark hanging over the Obama campaign is how much the candidate himself believes in this glowing vision of bipartisan adulation, how deeply he desires to make it manifest. Because the Republicans aren't going to slip quietly into that good night. When the Democrats sat stone-faced through the President's demand to extend his tax cuts, they weren't being partisan, they don't believe in extending the tax cuts. Similarly, when Republicans glare through a President Obama's promise to bring the troops home, or fight for universal, government-provided health care, they'll be following a mixture of their donors and their beliefs.

I think it's sort of an odd objection. George Bush split the chamber last night because that's what he wanted to do. He could have chosen to avoid specifics. He could have stopped short of demanding legislative incentives for HSAs and rested instead on vague platitudes about all members of Congress working together to insure the uninsured. He could have more generally limited his speech to the mushy, unobjectionable terms upon which liberals and conservatives supposedly agree. He chose instead to bring the divide between the two camps into sharp focus. So there was a lot of half-applause.

If Bush wanted to unite the Congress in applause all night, he could have done it. Obama watched Bush's speech and responded that part of his unity program will involve avoiding opportunistic partisan bomb-throwing. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.