Well, in Tuesday night's unprecedented three-way competition to redefine the idea of a political platitude for a new century, the president of the United States was the clear winner. The other two competitors finished very far up the track. Representative Paul Ryan needs a lot of practice with the teleprompter, and at sounding like a human being in general. Representative Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, needs to work on not looking up and to the right of the camera lens, like she's waiting for the crew from the Nervous Hospital to bust in and drag her off. Compared to these two trainwrecks, Barack Obama's "America! Dude, We Rock!" pep talk was measured, nuanced, and, for the most part, very clearly in English.

You cannot truly judge Obama's second State of the Union address without first coming to grips with what came after it. Make no mistake: Michele Bachmann is a howling loon — a woman with no compunction at all about lying through her not inconsiderable teeth about virtually everything — but Ryan, no matter what his reputation elsewhere as a "serious" economic thinker, is no less radical, if somewhat less nutty. Where Bachmann has her devotion to the Constitution written by the voices in her head, Ryan has his economic "roadmap," a Randian fever dream he produced a while back that so alarmed his fellow Republicans that they ran away as though Ryan had proposed the Affordable Cholera Act of 2009. The roadmap didn't come up on Tuesday evening. Instead, Ryan, heavily lacquered enough to pass for a mahogany coffee table, seemed to imply that his three small children will one day be personally responsible for paying down the entire national debt. The rest of his rebuttal was a masterpiece of Dystopia Porn. Except for that bit about the Social Security net becoming a "hammock" there at the end, which was right of a 1978 Charles Murray start set and, frankly, pretty brazen from a guy who went through high school on his dearly departed father's Social Security money.

Clearly, neither Ryan nor Bachmann has the foggiest notion of the role that the government of the United States of America — and the spending of public coin — played in making this country the world-historic power that you can read about in books. Ryan because his ideology won't allow him to acknowledge such things, and Bachmann because she's several bricks shy of a load. But no matter how many times they mangle the story, our primacy in the world wasn't brought to you solely by the miracle of the unfettered marketplace, nor by a thousand points of light or by fairy dust sprinkled down by the benevolent rich. Rather, it was brought to you by risk takers who presumed to do big things partnered with a government that saw the wisdom of investing in said big things. And in small things, too. Like people. And these investments created the largest economic engine in history: the American middle class. Ignorance of this fact makes it no less a fact. Just because the Ryan-Bachmann axis seems utterly oblivious of basic American economic history will not change this fact.

If you're running for president as a Republican in 2012, the ground between those two responses is the terrain you'll have to navigate to get your party's nomination. Good luck with that.

In the chamber, though, Barack Obama went a good distance toward locking up his re-election.

The president's own speech was more grounded in reality than was Bachmann's, and a great deal more hopeful than was Ryan's. It could hardly be otherwise. But, in its own way, it was just as far-removed from the basic economic pressures facing his audience as are Bachmann's fantasies about 16,000 IRS agents fanning out across the landscape to force people into "Obamacare" at gunpoint. It's hard to concentrate on "winning the future" when you're struggling to keep your house out of foreclosure that afternoon. For a great number of people in this country, their daily "Sputnik Moment" is keeping the lights turned on.

Obama said the right things about protecting Social Security, but he did so in the context of deficit reduction, which should set the alarm bells ringing. The case for protecting that program in a time of recession has nothing at all to do with the deficit. (Indeed, neither does Social Security at all, but that's a different argument for David Gergen to ignore.) It has to do with an established obligation of government to ameliorate the effects of renegade capitalism, a problem that went unmentioned in the State of the Union address, for all the president's joy that the stock market is roaring and that corporate profits are up. For all the talk about innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit that we heard, the fact remains that we are only just now emerging from an era — perhaps an avoidable one — in which the only big things this country created were new and fascinating financial mechanisms with which a very few people could get very, very rich while taking the world economy over a cliff. Solar shingles and new drilling equipment are nice, but the credit-default swap is where American innovation really lived.

The speech did not resonate, at least partly because it was overshadowed from the start by the one Obama had given in Tucson two weeks ago, and by the strange improvisational seating arrangement inspired by a desire on the part of the members of Congress to demonstrate to the folks back home what great pals they really are. But, for all of its paeans to the indomitable spirit of American innovation, the State of the Union also fell flat because it did not confront the fact that at least a quarter of the country has gone so far around the bend that it may never come back. All of that pitching for clean new energy sources and green technology was being directed at a political party that is committed to its soul to the idea that the climate crisis does not exist. There was no appeal to Americans to be smarter, to be less violent with each other, to resist the temptation to be such abject suckers every time some grifter comes by with a "roadmap" or some mumbo-jumbo about The Founders, every one of whom would have laughed Michele Bachmann out of Independence Hall. There was an appeal to Americans to be better teachers, better scientists, better businesspeople. There was no appeal to Americans to be better citizens, to be better caretakers of a self-governing political commonwealth.

Not for the first time, nor we fear for the last, Barack Obama reassured us all that we are a great people with a great country facing great challenges that we can overcome with our national greatness, hell yeah! It's certainly a better message than the two that came after it. But it assumes a lot of facts not in evidence. The president remains uncomfortable in the presence of irrationality, and there's still too much of that going around.

PLUS: The (Conservative) State of the Union Address Obama Would Never Give

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