AMERICANS, opined Barack Obama near the beginning of his state-of-the-union address, do not expect their politicians “to agree on every issue”. Nonetheless, he continued, “they do expect us to forge reasonable compromise where we can.” That is not just a fine sentiment: with Republicans in control of the House of Representatives, Mr Obama will have to do some haggling to get any of the elaborate agenda laid out in his speech adopted. Most urgently, a compromise will be needed if America is to escape the “sequester”, a big package of spending cuts due to take effect on March 1st, but designed to be so extreme that Congress would never actually allow them to occur. Yet finding that compromise looks harder than ever.

Mr Obama proposed much the same formula to reduce the deficit and avert the sequester as he has previously, though never in so elevated a forum. He offered to allow substantial cuts to Medicare, the government’s health-insurance scheme for the old—something most Democrats resist. In exchange, he said, Congress should raise revenue by eliminating loopholes and deductions in the tax code. Tax reform is something that Republicans have generally been in favour of.

This is the deal that the two parties were groping towards at the end of last year, in an effort to avoid not just the sequester but also big tax increases for all Americans that were scheduled to take effect on January 2nd as George W. Bush’s tax cuts expired. In the end, however, with no agreement reached by the end of the year, Republicans reluctantly agreed to around $620 billion in tax increases on the rich over 10 years without any accompanying cuts—something the president made only a passing acknowledgment of when calling for further revenue. Instead, he couched his proposal in the language of his re-election campaign, again casting himself as the defender of the middle class and Republicans as handmaidens of the rich. His opponents, he implied, wanted to force “senior citizens and working families to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while asking nothing more from the wealthiest and the most powerful.”

The Republicans have repeatedly ruled out further tax increases, possibly because they feel aggrieved that they have appeared to be the big losers in the year’s end deal. In fact, though, in earlier rounds of negotiation, they had secured ten-year spending cuts worth almost three times as much as the $620 billion in tax increases, so overall, the balance of spending cut to extra tax revenues is strongly in their favour. Huff and puff though they will, a solution to the problem of the sequester based on what the administration is still proposing is not a bad deal for them. Whether they will take it is quite a different matter.

The budget aside, there were a few proposals that should appeal to Republicans, most notably the launch of talks on a free-trade agreement with the European Union and a renewed push to reach a deal on the transpacific Partnership, a proposed free-trade area involving ten other countries on the Pacific Rim. On the one subject where bipartisan talks do seem to be making progress, immigration reform, Mr Obama was careful not to offend anyone, although his outline of a potential deal omitted a guest-worker programme, something Republicans are keen on. He also offered stern words for North Korea and Iran, and promised to “stand steadfast with Israel”—although that will not be enough to quell Republican complaints that he is hard on America’s allies and soft on its enemies.

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However for the most part Mr Obama packed his speech with ideas Republicans hate. He urged Congress to forswear threats to shut the federal government down or stop paying America’s bills, both cherished Republican negotiating tactics in fiscal disputes. He made an impassioned plea for stricter gun laws, invoking a series of recent massacres and pointing to the parents of a recent shooting victim, who were sitting in the gallery next to his wife. He talked about making it easier to vote, not a popular cause on the right. He demanded that Congress pass a cap-and-trade bill to curb global warming—absolute anathema to most Republican lawmakers—and then threatened to pursue the same goal by regulatory fiat if it did not.

On top of all this came various proposals which, while desirable in themselves, all cost money. The president said he wants to ensure universal access to pre-school teaching, to expand vocational training in high school, to set up a network of institutes promoting manufacturing and to create a tax credit for hiring the long-term unemployed, among other new schemes. All of this, he promised, would not add a dime to the deficit, although he provided no details of how it would be paid for other than by reallocating existing spending.