State of the Union: le discours le plus important de la campagne

S'il joue bien ses cartes, un Président dispose d'un avantage redoutable sur son adversaire républicain puisque le candidat démocrate fusionne avec l'exécutif. Mardi Obama prendra toute la place et tous les médias seront tournés vers lui. Une arme à deux tranchants cependant, autant un bon discours peut orienter les débats à venir, autant un échec peut être retentissant. Parions que l'équipe du Président a concocté un discours qui mettra les républicains sur la défensive. Les divisions entre Romney et Gingrich, tout comme la division entre les républicains "traditionnels" et leurs collègues du Tea party, favorisent Obama.

 "The Republican candidates, who have reveled in the spotlight and battered Barack Obama for months, are about to get a sharp lesson in the power of the presidency. The most important 2012 campaign event so far — and almost certainly the most important until the parties’ national conventions this summer — will take place Tuesday night under the guise of a governing ritual.

It is hardly a shock to say that the State of the Union address — which has drawn audiences of 43 million to 52 million viewers in the Obama years, crushing any of the recent GOP candidate debates — will be a political affair. Every State of the Union address of modern times has been, in its own way, thoroughly political. But Obama will appear on Capitol Hill as a president who is virtually wiping out the space, never wide to begin with, betwee n politicking and governing in the West Wing as Election Day nears.

 It is a strategy of necessity, Obama believes. He ran for president in 2008 decrying Washington’s climate of hyperpartisanship. Yet months of halting and mostly failed efforts in 2011 to craft bargains with Republicans on the budget leave the president, as his aides see it, with little choice but to make 2012 a year of drawing sharp contrasts with his rivals.

If there are deals to be cut, by this logic, they will come only if Obama wins a second term and greets a chastened opposition in 2013. In the meantime, nearly every aspect of daily life in his West Wing is influenced by a campaign mentality — never mind press secretary Jay Carney’s regular scolding of White House reporters to stop viewing everything the president does “through the prism of politics.”

 Obama and his top aides hold regular calls with campaign staff in Chicago, and it shows. The White House timed the recess appointment of a new consumer watchdog to counter the Iowa caucuses and a jobs summit to bookend the New Hampshire primary. At that summit, he singled out four swing states — Michigan, Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio — as places that could benefit from his manufacturing policies. Obama raised millions of dollars at nine fundraisers in the past two weeks alone.

  http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71798.html