Despite being political theatre at its most schmaltzy and nauseating — "She was 15 years old," the president said of a girl who'd been shot. "She loved Fig Newtons [biscuits] and lip gloss. She was a majorette. She was so good to her friends they all thought they were her best friend" — the Sotu does at least set out the administration's agenda, albeit in a way that is very long on rhetoric and very short of specifics. When the promises Obama made — a 24 per cent hike in the minimum  wage (at a time of 8 per cent unemployment and negligible inflation), combating climate change (no one calls it global warming on the blizzard-hit East Coast any more), $50 billion in infrastructure projects, free preschool programmes for all American children, "an Aids-free generation", federal help with mortgages, and so expensively on — are all costed, his promise that it wouldn't add a dime to the deficit looks impossible to meet, except, as he boasted, by "raising tax rates on the wealthiest 1 per cent of Americans". Naked class war has worked well for him, and will continue to. 

Declaring an end to the war in Afghanistan and scuttling from the country next year, condemning it to further debilitating civil war and a possible Taliban victory, somehow drew yet another standing ovation, as did his promise on Iran that "we will do what is necessary to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon". That he is signally not doing, since he is not selling or giving Israel the 30,000lb bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs necessary for the task. If only they hadn't spent so much time on standing ovations, the legislators could have got out of the chamber in half the one hour that the Sotu speech took, and emerged blinking into the real world, where promises mean something and are properly costed.