Listening to President Obama on Tuesday night, I was struck by how the debate on guns has changed. Born and raised on a cotton farm in deep-red Tennessee, a son of the South, I grew up hunting and fishing with my father, who was reputed to be the finest quail shot in Crockett County. As a younger man, I was forced to defend my home in the middle of the night with a firearm. The burglar was a career criminal, just out of prison after robbing a liquor store with a sawed-off shotgun. The cops knew him by name when they came to get him. I was lucky.

President Obama delivered the first State of the Union of his second term Tuesday night, and by the looks of it, Daily Beast readers liked it.

Shortly after the hourlong speech ended, we asked our Facebook fans for one-word reactions, and 1,174 of you weighed in. Using Tagxedo, an online application that converts text into word clouds, we arranged your responses into an America-shaped visual representation. (Keep in mind the geographical location of the words bears no meaning. Also, larger words indicate that multiple people used that term to describe the speech.)

Tuesday night, President Obama said the state of the union is strong. But how strong were all of his claims? Let’s take a look at what the Internet’s best fact checkers have to say about the President’s speech.

“I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”

Emotion matters in politics, and President Obama drew on an ample well of it in the service of his proposals to curb gun violence. Seated in first lady Michelle Obama’s box were powerful symbols of the nation’s ongoing struggle with guns. There was a teacher from Sandy Hook Elementary, where 20 first graders and six teachers were gunned down, a police officer who took a dozen bullets when he was first on the scene to confront a shooter at a Sikh temple, and the parents of a Chicago teenager gunned down in a park just a mile from Obama’s house—days after she performed in his inaugural parade.

The teen’s name was Hadiya Pendleton, and Obama recalled how the 15-year-old girl loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss. She was a majorette and on her way to a bright future when her life was cut tragically short, one of the “more than a thousand birthdays, graduations, and anniversaries … stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun” in the two months since Newtown. Urging Congress “to come together to protect our most precious resource—our children,” Obama said he knows this is not the first time the country has debated how to reduce gun violence. “But this time is different,” he said.

And Jason Wu takes the FLOTUS prize again. It may have taken nearly two hours to identify the designer of Michelle Obama’s State of the Union attire on Tuesday night, but post-speech, the news came that Wu was the creator of the First Lady’s shimmering cocktail dress. Around 9pm, Obama emerged in the House of Representatives wearing an empire-waist oxblood and black A-line dress made of a tweed fabric, which she accessorized with an Alexis Bittar floral pin and still-intact bangs. Her dress’s neckline and armholes were trimmed with leather cording, and the frock’s lack of sleeves accentuated Obama’s famously buff arms.

The dress may have received mixed reviews from the twittersphere (the Wall Street Journal even questioned its political affiliation) but it stumped fashion experts as well. During President Obama’s first term, Mrs. Obama was known to endorse a wide array of young American labels, jumping between designers like Thakoon, Wes Gordon, Narciso Rodriguez, and Isabel Toledo, to name a few. Wu was, of course, one of her first major picks, having designed the ivory chiffon floor-length gown that Obama wore to her husband’s first inaugural ball. She wore the designer’s clothes many times thereafter, but not to as many consecutive high-profile events as she has in the past month.

President Obama is at a moment of maximum political leverage. But for all the bipartisan framing of his State of the Union speech, the basic fact of divided government makes legislative progress difficult.

To understand why Democrats are doing better than Republicans in an America that less and less resembles an episode of Father Knows Best, just compare President Obama’s State of the Union address with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s response. Rubio flaunted his immigrant and working-class roots, but biography aside, he told the same story about America that the GOP has been telling for decades.

Time for Reform

What does it take for a Democratic president to start talking like a Democrat about economic issues? Two big presidential election wins, apparently. For when it comes to economics, President Obama delivered a center-left speech for a center-left economic country.

President Obama used his State of the Union to pivot back to the economy, saying he wants to protect “senior citizens” and “working families” from bearing the brunt of budget-cutting, but the Washington ritual was nearly overshadowed by a California crime drama.

By the time Obama called for generating enough jobs for “a thriving middle class” on Tuesday night, he found himself sharing the television stage as the cable news networks blanketed a shootout at Big Bear with accused cop-killer Christopher Dorner that left one police officer dead and another wounded. It was a split-screen moment reminiscent of Bill Clinton delivering his 1997 State of the Union during the verdict in O.J. Simpson’s civil trial—and all the more surreal since Obama talked about gun violence after the Big Bear cabin in which Dorner was hiding went up in flames.

Wonder what issues President Obama will focus on during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address? Look no further than the first family’s personal guest list.