Since the speech is called the State of the Union address, it was expected that U.S. President Barack Obama would devote most of his time to domestic concerns. In that regard, he did not disappoint. Two-thirds of his 75-minute talk focused on the economy, with much of the remainder challenging members of the Congress to rise above politics and work together to govern the nation. That plea is likely to fall on deaf ears: The partisan divide in Washington is the deepest it has ever been. If the founders of the American republic sought a divided and inefficient government, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Mr. Obama is perceived to be on the ropes after Republican Scott Brown won the special election for the Massachusetts Senate seat that had been a Democratic Party stronghold. The GOP win deprived the president's party of its 60-seat supermajority in the Senate and heralded, for Republican strategists, the stirrings of the tidal wave of voter resentment that they think will bring their party back to power in Congress. That assessment is fanciful: The Democrats still have one more Senate seat than they did a year ago and Republicans enjoy no greater confidence from the voting public than their counterparts across the aisle.

But the perception of presidential weakness is real, and perceptions shape reality. Mr. Obama is thought to be on the defensive, with health care, his signature program, hanging in limbo as House and Senate Democrats struggle to reconcile two competing visions of reform. His efforts to revitalize the economy have languished, not because they have been ineffective — almost all economists credit the administration's efforts with preventing the Great Recession from becoming another Great Depression — but because they are not seen as doing enough for the average American. Wall Street is again celebrating oversized bonuses, unemployment continues to grow, and the government deficit has reached truly astronomical proportions. Resistance to new efforts to deploy government resources to solve social problems is growing in tandem with that debt.