"How do you make the case that things could have been far worse — even if that’s totally true — when people are still suffering?"

Scott Wilson (WaPo):

The setting: An election-year State of the Union address before a hostile Congress. Since the last one, the world has changed fundamentally, a war with Iraq has ended, and the nation’s economy is fragile and worrying to a majority of Americans.

“Now to our troubles at home, they are not all economic, but the primary problem is our economy,” the president tells a prime-time audience. “There are certain things a president can do without Congress, and I am going to do them.”

President Obama? No. George H.W. Bush in his 1992 State of the Union address, delivered 10 months before voters made him a one-term president. No other president has been able to claim that dubious, single-term distinction in the last three decades. MORE...

H/t to Greg Sargent for the headline and the link.