There will be more prose, less poetry, though President Obama will certainly highlight the themes of his Inaugural Address and his earlier poetic speeches. He will be specific about policy: on immigration, gun violence, climate change, military expenditures and reforms, and the need for a balanced approach to immediate and long-term economic challenges. He will hang tough on the sequestration, calling the Republicans’ bluff, and he will warn of the dangers the U.S. faces abroad, while he defends his foreign policy, including his major accomplishment of ending two disastrous wars (though he won’t call them that). The speech is going to be about jobs and the middle class. This is all expected by the chattering class, and I think Obama will meet expectations. But I also think that there will be more interesting things going on. The President will move forcefully ahead on his major project, moving the center left on issues foreign and domestic. And there are significant signs he is succeeding, see this report from a deep red state.

Look for an opening to Republican moderates. I suspect Obama will not only stake out his positions, but also point to the way that those holding other positions may work with him on contentious issues. This will be most apparent in immigration reform. He will also likely address Republicans concerns about long-term cuts in government spending.

He will highlight the need for a leaner, but as mean, military budget, as he denounces the dangers of the thoughtless cuts in military spending via the sequester. Real cuts in military spending will please his base, including me, but also some more libertarian Republicans, Rand Paul, though not John McCain.

Less pleasing for progressives would be what Obama very well may say about so-called “entitlements.” I am not sure he will do this now, but if not now, when?

He could make clear his priority – control medical and Medicare expenses, reminding us that this is a task of Obamacare, but he also may make gestures suggesting more Republican friendly solutions concerning intelligent cutting of expenditures: on indexing and eligibility issues for Medicare and perhaps also Social Security. He is unlikely to be specific. He will emphasize that these programs are essential. Yet, he could strategically reveal an openness to Republican ideas, as he emphasizes the need for bi-partisan support of infrastructure, education, research and development, meeting the economic and environmental challenges of the day. This would be an invitation to moderate Republicans to break away from the “party of no.”

Obama’s recent legislative victories included Republican votes on the fiscal cliff and the debt ceiling. I believe he will talk about the economy in such a way that he strengthens his capacity to draw upon this new governing coalition. He will do it in the name of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class. This is the formulation of Obama for ordinary folk, the popular classes, the great bulk of the demos, the people. In this speech and in others, they are the subjects of change, echoing Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: government of the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, by the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, for the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class. (More on this on another day.)

Obama will declare the state of the Union as fundamentally sound and improving. He will underscore the contingencies of the improvement. He will speak to the middle class and those aspiring to be in the middle class, but also to the members of Congress.  Speaking to the Congress, he will draw upon the themes of his re-election campaign and his recent speeches on gun violence and immigration. With public support, he will call on Congress to act, and he will suggest the path. He will speak in the name of those who voted for him, but will reach out to the representatives of those who didn’t to find common cause on key crucial issues. He will voice his fundamental commitments and suggest compromise. It will be interesting to see how he will balance these.

I think Obama’s constancy is the most remarkable aspect of his presidency. Tactics have changed, as he has worked with a Democratic majority in Congress, with a Republican dominated Congress, and against a Republican dominated Congress. But his goals have not changed, most clearly summarized, in my judgment, in two key speeches. The one that made him a national figure: his keynote address to the Democratic Convention in 2004 (and the many speeches that followed repeated its inclusive themes) and his recent Inaugural Address, which most clearly and compactly articulates his progressive aspirations. He is a centrist who wants to include into public debate the experiences and aspirations of the American people in its diversity, including the diversity of opinion: progressive, conservative and moderate. But he has his specific commitments, and he wants those commitments, most sharply revealed in the Inaugural Address, to be at the center of the debate. Expect a State of the Union that links these two speeches, pointing to specific actions, and, therefore, pushing forward the Obama transformation.

Did they “2” it again? Only if they were Democrats.

As the 113^th Congress was sworn in many were pleased about the increased numbers of women in both houses. This was also true for the state legislatures, though not for all of them. While more women are welcome, it’s important to understand that this progress is one-sided, or more accurately, one-partied. In the 2012 election, Democratic women got a big boost. Republican women didn’t.

In January of 2013, women were 29 percent of the Democrats and 9 percent of the Republicans in both houses of Congress. Whereas women increased their presence in the Democratic Caucus from last year, they decreased their presence in the Republican Conference in both numbers and percentages.

After the 2012 election, the number of women Republicans elected to Congress went down twenty percent, from 24 to 20 in the House and from 5 to 4 in the Senate. The number of women Democrats increased by ten and twenty percent respectively, from 53 to 58 in the House and 13 to 16 in the Senate.

Something similar happened in the state legislatures. Republican women decreased their presence by 7 to 8 percent and the Democratic women increased theirs by 3 to 10 percent. As of January, 2013, women are 37 percent of all Democratic state house members and 28 percent of Democratic state senators. They are only 18 and 13 percent, respectively, of their Republican counterparts.

Two factors account for this: Women candidates do well in election years that end in “2.” Women candidates win when the Democrats win. What’s magical about “2” years is that the first legislative contests after the decennial reapportionment are held in those years. New districts create new opportunities. More seats are open — i.e. have no incumbent — in “2” years than in others, and even incumbents must appeal to new constituents within their new district lines.

This has been a factor only since the 1960s when the Supreme Court ruled that legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. Until compelled to do so, many states did not change their legislative district lines, or even those of their Congressional districts. The members of the state legislatures who were charged with that duty liked to keep things as they were.

The modern women’s movement also emerged in the 1960s, and by 1972 public awareness was growing about the dismal lack of women in public office. Consciousness was raised by Rep. Shirley Chisholm’s campaign for President that year, even though she insisted that she was not running as the women’s candidate. The impact of the 1972 redistricting and the feminist movement could be seen in the 18.8 percent increase in the number of women sworn in as state legislators in 1973. The numbers were still tiny, but they continued to rise steeply for the next twenty years.

Women could respond so fast to the opportunities offered by the 1972 redistricting because they hadn’t been out of politics in the previous 50 years, just out of sight. Not only were women a significant majority of campaign workers, but organizations like the League of Women Voters had been training them to do legislative work for decades and implanting many with the idea that they could do it better inside the legislature.

In 1992, the number of women elected to Congress took a great leap upward, from 29 to 47 in the House and from 2 to 7 in the Senate. After crawling from two to six percent during the previous two decades, women were ten percent of the 103rd Congress.

Once again, redistricting created opportunity, but only where women were ready to take advantage of it. In the previous twenty years, women had gone from five to twenty-one percent of state legislators, a major source of Congressional candidates. The states which had elected women to the state legislatures in larger numbers began to elect them to Congress.

This increase was not bipartisan. The 1992 election brought a big increase in the number of Democratic women, but only a small one for Republicans. In the 1980s women had been a greater portion of Republican than Democratic members of Congress. The “party gap” this created in Congress had emerged a decade earlier in the state legislatures. In 1981, women were about 12 percent of both the Republican and Democratic state legislators. Their proportion among the Democrats rose slowly but steadily to over 31 percent in 2009. Among Republican state legislators the proportion of women rose more slowly, flattened out in the mid-1990s, and fell as the new century began. There are fewer Republican women serving in the state legislatures in 2013 than in 2000. There are ten percent more Democratic women.

The number of women state legislators peaked at 1,809 before the 2010 elections. When the voters favored the Republicans that year they reduced women’s presence. Many more Democratic women lost their seats than Republican women won theirs. They have not yet caught up.

There are many reasons why Republican women are less likely than Democratic women to become legislators. Some have to do with the voters; some with how each party recruits (or doesn’t recruit) its candidates. The bottom line is that hallelujahs for the greater number of women in the 113th Congress are coming a bit too early.

The Republicans elected to the state legislatures in 2010 were able to draw districts which will favor Republican candidates for the next decade. The type of voters who vote in the midterm elections are more likely to favor Republicans. That means that women’s progress into elected office will stall unless the Republican Party decides to practice a little affirmative action, or the voters swing heavily to the Democrats.

“The early George W. Bush years saw spending bounce up to a plateau of roughly 20% of GDP, but no more than 20.7% as recently as 2008. Then came the Obama blowout, in league with Nancy Pelosi’s Congress. With the recession as a rationale, Democrats consciously blew up the national balance sheet, lifting federal outlays to 25% in 2009, the highest level since 1945.”

The editorial is accompanied by a chart to illustrate the basic claim–witness the remarkable uptick of the curve between 2008 and 2009:

At first sight, the chart appears to sustain the WSJ charge and to indicate that federal spending under Obama is of a different order of magnitude from the past. For a moment, it shook my own antipathy to the Republican position; maybe, in all fairness, the blame deserves to be more evenly divided between the two sides of the political aisle. My curiosity aroused, I probed more deeply into the numbers (which come from the OMB website). I’d like to share what I discovered. I make no claims about any special knowledge of the intricacies of the federal budget, just an affinity with numbers.

If you have followed me this far, you may have guessed what is coming—the discovery of a deceptive use of data. It begins with a disturbing piece of disingenuousness, if not dishonesty, in the WSJ editorial, which places the responsibility for remarkably high level of fiscal year (FY) 2009 expenditures entirely at Obama’s door.  But a federal fiscal year begins on October 1 of the prior year, and the Bush White House was therefore the source of the FY 2009 budget passed by Congress and responsible for spending some of the money. The budget as proposed authorized $3.1 trillion in expenditures (and didn’t include the full costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars); actual expenditures rose to $3.5 trillion, an increase that does not appear so remarkable in light of the enormous economic turmoil of late 2008 and the first half of 2009. Unsurprisingly, a large part of the increase from the prior fiscal year, $260 billion, can be found in the human-resources category, as unemployment and Social-Security payments rose.

Then, there is the editorial’s insistence on viewing federal spending in relation to GDP. The problem is that the expenditures-to-GDP ratio has two sources of variation, not one. Indeed, the ratio is so high in FY 2009 in part because the GDP declined between 2008 and 2009 as a consequence of the recession. And it hasn’t risen much since. As a consequence, the ratio tends to inflate the apparent spending levels since Obama became President. It is useful, then, to look directly at the nominal levels of federal expenditure from year to year.

Looked at this way, the expenditures of the Bush years reveal a momentum of steady increase that averages $160 billion per year. In the first budget year that the Bush White House fully “owned,” FY 2002, expenditures amounted to $2.01 trillion (in nominal, not inflation-adjusted dollars); in the last, FY 2008, they rose to $2.98 trillion—in other words, an increase of just under $1 trillion. The drivers of increasing expenditures were mainly twofold: defense spending (two wars, of course); and human resources, with Social Security and Medicare sharing lead roles.

The same drivers have been at work so far during the Obama years, so the same momentum should be present. In fact, the expenditures in FY 2010 are almost exactly in line with the year-to-year increases of the Bush years: that is, the $3.46 trillion actually spent is not much above the $3.30 trillion one would anticipate by straightforward extrapolation from FY 2008 (see chart below). Given the slow recovery and high unemployment rate, the bump up seems reasonable.

OMB projects the FY 2011 expenditures to come in at around $3.82 trillion, admittedly a sizable increase from the prior year, but expenditures are then expected to level off. These projections may turn out to be off the mark. But the main point is that during the Obama years so far, with the exception of FY 2009, a year that the Bush administration at least partly owns, the year-to-year changes in federal spending are not much above those of the Bush years, and any differences seem easy to explain in terms of the needs of more economically difficult times.  There is no sign here of a runaway federal budget.

Intent on its narrative, the WSJ editorial omits any analysis of federal income, which, as is widely known, has reached its lowest level as a percent of GDP since the 1950s—14.9%. In nominal dollars, income fell during the early years of the oughts decade as a result of the Bush tax cuts and was just starting to recover when it dropped precipitously, by $400 billion, in FY 2009, because of the recession. Unlike federal spending, federal revenue is, in 2010, barely above (in nominal dollars!) what it was a decade before (see chart):

The big story, in other words, is not the rise of federal spending but the stagnation of federal receipts. Taking inflation into account, they have suffered a significant decline since 2000, of about 16 percent. There would seem to be no way to rectify the budget situation without doing something to correct this slide downward.

The WSJ editorial gets it exactly wrong!