In his stirring inaugural address, President Obama linked the civil rights struggles at Selma to the continuing chaos of America’s elections today. “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote,” the president said.

Barack Obama has a lot of work to do in tonight’s State of the Union address. He has to go over the heads of recalcitrant Republicans and cowardly Democrats and make a case to the American people on his gun-control measures. He has to do something similar, although it’s not quite as high a hurdle, on immigration reform. He has to make the cases for his defense and intelligence nominees. And more. But job No. 1 seems pretty clear to me: frame the debate about the sequester and the budget. The GOP strategy on this actually stands a chance of fooling a considerable portion of the American public, unless Obama uses tonight’s stage to expose its dishonesty and paint the GOP into a corner with specifics.

Cody Keenan, one of seven speechwriters to join the White House staff when President Obama took office in 2009, toiled in relative obscurity until 2011. That’s when his breakthrough came with the president’s speech at a Tucson memorial honoring victims of gun violence. The address won praise for its healing tone and revealed a skill with words and emotion that the 32-year-old Keenan is employing in a very different arena as the lead speechwriter on Obama’s Tuesday evening State of the Union address.

In the run up to every State of the Union address, a favorite Beltway parlor game is to obsess over every aspect of the speech: what the president will say, what he should say, what guests he’ll invite, and on and on.  It is, if not much ado about nothing, certainly much ado about what is, ultimately, just a political speech.

President Obama heads into Tuesday’s State of the Union speech with a crippling sequester looming, and the tone he takes toward his adversaries could determine whether automatic cuts in spending will follow less than three weeks later. Will he follow the fighting tone of his second inaugural? How combative will he get in urging Congress to come up with a plan to avert the sequester, and how directly will he blame the Republicans for the current impasse?  

The SOTU is a night for highlighting partisan differences, as lawmakers take turns standing and clapping or sitting and scowling based on the policies that separate them. With the advent of the Tea Party and record deficits, the two parties have rarely been more bitterly divided than they are under Obama. Even so, former Clinton budget chief Alice Rivlin says Obama should return to the tone of his ’08 campaign, when he said, naively, she concedes, that he came to Washington to change the tone. “It hasn’t worked very well, but this is the moment to go back to it, because if he doesn’t, he dooms the rest of his term to squabbling with the Republicans.”