For two weeks, Charles P. Pierce is taking a hard-earned and well-deserved vacation. As such, we're re-promoting some of the greatest pieces he's written on President Barack Obama for Esquire over the last several years. We hope that the insights in these classic stories help contextualize other happenings you might find in your daily news feed. We continue it today with his breakdown of Obama's first State of the Union address, delivered on January 27, 2010. The moment stands as a clear benchmark for his first year as president. —The Editors

It's a wonder he didn't laugh out loud.

Looking out over the frauds and lightweights and bland hunks of man-cheese that make up the assembled political establishment, and beyond them to a spavined and impotent political culture that would embarrass any self-respecting monkey house, and beyond that to a country willing to abandon almost anything it once deemed important to the first huckster who turns up weeping on cable television, Barack Obama must have been sorely tempted to let out one final, mighty guffaw and close his first State of the Union address with the words, "And I am the only president of the United States in this room, motherfuckers," after which he would return to the White House and eat Mitch McConnell's gonads on toast.

But, of course, he didn't do that. There were the usual sonorous banalities about how everyone in Washington should work together, and about how great the American people are. There was something in the address to piss off just about everyone. He came out for more nuclear plants, for the marketing mirage that is "clean" coal, and, if not for "Drill, baby drill," then for "Drill a little bit there, baby." He talked about tax cuts until hell wouldn't have them. "Thought I might get a little applause there," he said, grinning down at the wax museum that is the Republican congressional leadership.

At the same time, he stuck the Republicans in a box over why they can't go along with a fee to get back the rest of the public money that the government shoveled into the banks so that Tim Geithner wouldn't be hanging from a lamppost in lower Manhattan. The lumpy Caucasians of American "conservatism" sat there motionless, freezing themselves into the opening frames of every campaign commercial that will be run on behalf of a Democrat come fall — if the Democrats are smart, which is always a long shot.

He had a whole truckload of ideas on making college more affordable. He talked tough on regulatory reform. He even mocked the Republicans on the spending freeze that was so unpopular with Obama's own base. When some hay-shaker snickered about the fact that the freeze doesn't start until 2011, he pointed out, "That is the way budgeting is done." And get that weak-ass shit out of my house.

And he did something I never thought he'd get around to doing. In his own unique way — which is to say elliptically and gently and with maddening equanimity — he made it quite plain on several occasions exactly who was responsible for the big, steaming bags of awful that were waiting on his desk when he took office a year ago. For all the pundits who were advising him to be more like the Blessed Ronnie Reagan, this was the most Reaganesque moment any president has had since ole Dutch shuffled off. In his first State of the Union, and for nearly three years after that, Reagan never missed an opportunity to hang anything that went wrong on Jimmy Carter. (No names, of course. This is Washington and that simply is not done.) Every time Obama referenced "the last administration" or "the lost decade," and, especially at that moment when, while discussing Republican economic policy, he explained, "That's what we did for eight years," I suspect the wind blew cold through the uncut brush of a now abandoned toy ranch in Crawford.

There was a weight to him last night that wasn't there during the campaign, as though he's spent a year in the job and realized quite recently how goddamn hard it is to work with cowards and morons to get anything whatsoever done, and that he realized even more recently that he really might be up to the job. All that serene confidence on the campaign trail always struck me as affectation, as armor against a job he was chasing that seemed to grow more miserable by the moment. No sane person should have wanted to be president that much in 2008. If he was having trouble finding his feet, it was because the presidency was more of a morass than it ever was.

Last night, though, he had to know. You don't do what he did unless you know — calling out not only the political opposition for its opportunistic nihilism, and not only the United States Senate for its structural inertia and for the remarkable number of venal gobshites among its membership, but the Supreme Goddamn Court of the United States, sitting right there in front of him, for handing down a recent decision that guarantees that every election for the foreseeable future will have all the essential integrity and nobility of a Moroccan bazaar. You don't do that, getting Justice Sam Alito mumbling under his breath like a drunk on a subway, unless you know you're the only president in the room.

Who else is there? The Democrats are a timorous collection of trimmers and hedgers, one more bad beat away from whimpering themselves into a gelatinous goo just liquid enough to ooze under the door of some lobbying shop. They couldn't get laid in a whorehouse if they drove up in a Brink's truck. They spent a flat year trying to get one vote out of Olympia Snowe.

And the Republicans are simply insane. Poor old John McCain is being primaried by J.D. Hayworth, once the dumbest man in Congress, at the behest of what might be called the lunatic fringe, if it wasn't the very mainstream of the party now. The energy of the party is wholly directed from the ancient, dark heart of American conspiracy theories, where it is not directed at simply standing athwart anything this president wants to do. Republicans repeatedly have voted against measures they have previously supported. Meanwhile, angry seniors in goofy hats have got them all terrified. Even Sarah Palin, as empty a vessel as ever was, is being eclipsed by Scott Brown, the recently elected senator from Massachusetts, who ran a campaign in which he was identified as a Republican about as often as he was identified as a Gaboon viper. The grumpy grampas loved him.

And the political culture is no better. Sally Quinn, the aging doyenne at the Washington Post, wrote a column shortly before the speech in which the Obama administration was chided for not going to all the right parties, and did so in a tone so arch it would have sent Marie Antoinette up the walls of the Bastille herself. The hottest book at the moment is Game Change, which is what de Tocqueville would have written, if he'd been a sniggering seventh-grade gossip, and which spends endless pages leering at the bloody wreckage of the marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards while mentioning Afghanistan twice. Being president at this sodden, moldering time in history requires a considerable immunity against infectious bullshit.

Barack Obama has been at this for a year. We've all watched as the noble speeches congealed into doughy inaction too often already. He has stumbled and he has bungled, and he's probably going to see a lot of his margin for error erased in the midterm elections in November. He still overrates the American people as a political commonwealth, and he remains resolutely determined to seek out the good in a political opposition that wants his head on a plate. But, last night, it became clear that he'd better know what he's doing, for all our sakes, because last night, he was the baddest ass on the block, and the only president in the hall.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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