WHILE watching the pantomime that is the president’s state of the union address, I couldn’t help but feel for John Boehner. As with any bit of political theatre, a lot of the drama is in the choreography: when to clap or look dour, stand up or roll eyes. As the Republican speaker of the House, Mr Boehner had the dubious honour of sitting directly behind the president for this annual address, on an elevated platform alongside Joe Biden, the vice president. For the entirety of Barack Obama’s hour-long speech, Mr Boehner’s job was apparently to wear a Noh theatre mask of disdain, and to take care to not inadvertently clap for something he doesn’t approve of. Playing it safe, he appeared to sit on his hands for most of the address, reluctant to endorse anything that didn’t feature words like “trade”, “veteran” or “9/11”. It is a tricky thing to be first violin when you hate the conductor and loathe the music. The consensus view of Mr Obama’s address (which we analyse in this week's paper) is that it was “partisan”. His tone was “defiant” and “self-assured”—despite the grim results seen by his party in the recent midterms. He boasted of the country’s “growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, and booming energy production” (“This is good news, people,” he said with a wink). He declared some ambitious goals to make life for working Americans easier, with plans to raise the minimum wage, make child-care more affordable and reform the tax code (“Let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one percent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth”). To better prepare America’s work force for the challenges of a 21st-century economy, he promised to expand job-training programmes and make community college more affordable. He called for more infrastructure investments, lower barriers to international trade and more money for medical research to help find cures for cancer and other diseases. He reminded Americans that the earth is warming up, and trumpeted his pact with China to reduce carbon emissions. And then he called for a “better politics”, in which Republicans and Democrats might “appeal to each other’s basic decency instead of our basest fears.”

It’s been fascinating to watch the big media maw chew this speech up and spit it out. Pundits on the left and the right both seem to agree that the president was partisan, and that none of his proposals will see light of day any time soon. Mr Obama’s lengthy bit about bipartisanship and shared values (and his desire to see the end of “gotcha” politics and “arguing past each other on cable shows”) has been dismissed as cynical and hypocritical, if it has been discussed at all. His plans to help the middle class in part by raising taxes on rich people are simply new fronts in his relentless class warfare. And of course any plans to engage with Cuba are entirely naïve.

It’s hard not to find these complaints about partisanship, and the overall sense of resignation in the face of congressional gridlock, rather depressing. Issues that seem “partisan” now, such as liveable wages and a bit more help for working families—stuff that most Republicans were disinclined to applaud on Tuesday night—are not necessarily Democrat issues. Many of the programmes Mr Obama described are actually policies Republicans have backed in the past, but which now appear untouchable because they are on a list of priorities outlined by a Democrat. Particularly polarising issues, such as abortion and gun control, were hardly mentioned. Sure, the president defended his record and touted some accomplishments, and promised to head off plans to simply undo his policies. But I didn't come away with the sense that the speech was a taunt at Republicans and a rallying cry for Democrats (unless even sounding confident is a polarising sign of hubris). Rather, it seems as though the problem is that America has become such a partisan country that even decent ideas that poll well end up sounding like thrown gauntlets. Is talk about the most recent climate statistics really a partisan issue? Is suggesting it is hard to live on $15,000 a year "class warfare"?

For a bit of context, it is useful to revisit the reception of old state of the union addresses. I’ve been watching and reading a few by Richard Nixon who, as a Republican president from 1969 to 1974, faced some similar hurdles: an endless and dispiriting war; a mysterious and haunting foreign foe; a sluggish economy; a Congress dominated by the opposing party. Interestingly, Nixon's speeches promoted some similar priorities. To help create more new jobs in the face of unemployment in 1971, Nixon called for a bigger budget to help stimulate the economy. He proposed reforms to welfare that created more incentives for work, yet placed “a floor under the income of every family with children in America”. “Let us generously help those who are not able to help themselves,” he said. “But let us stop helping those who are able to help themselves but refuse to do so.” He made pledges to protect the environment, clean up the country’s air and water, and bring “parks to the people where the people are.” As for health care, he promised to make it “available more fairly to more people”, and called for an extra $100m to help find a cure for cancer. (The videos of these addresses are themselves intriguing glimpses of a time when a president’s speech wasn’t relentlessly interrupted by spontaneous standing ovations by a single party; and when a president needn’t have been a terribly charismatic speaker, nor have a facial skin-tone that matched his neck.)

Perhaps some complained at the time that Nixon’s proposals were cynical, partisan or naïve, and certainly doomed to failure. But in fact many of his ideas became policy, even with Democrats controlling the House and Senate. The new Congress that had just been sworn in that January 1971 could have found it useful to make Nixon look like a failure, with a presidential election ostensibly lurking around the corner (though two years back then were far longer in politics than they are now). But in fact they passed a lot of landmark legislation that continues to benefit Americans today. The long and impressive list includes the National Cancer Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act, the Consumer Product Safety Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act (which banned discrimination based on sex) and the Federal Election Campaign Act, which increased disclosure of contributions for federal campaigns. And that's just during a single two-year Congressional term. The number of important laws passed during Nixon's truncated presidency is frankly astounding.

One can’t help but feel wistful for an era when a president’s ideas might’ve been debated on their merits, and when lawmakers took their job of making law seriously. It has become hard to remember a time when truculence wasn't the surest route to political power, and when policies weren't simply dismissed as "partisan" before being thrown away.

(Photo credit: STF / CONSOLIDATED NEWS PICTURES / AFP)