WASHINGTON — President Obama’s first State of the Union address didn’t signal a political shift to the left or the right. It sounded more like a shrewd attempt to move from the inside to the outside — to position himself alongside disaffected voters, peering through the windows of the den of iniquity called Washington and reacting with dismay at the depravity within.

In the course of a 70-minute speech, Obama slammed almost everybody in town. He even included a little self-deprecation and self-doubt — “I know there are many Americans who aren’t sure if they still believe we can change — or that I can deliver it.” But that followed a lengthy indictment of how Washington works, or doesn’t work. It is a tribute to Obama’s rhetorical gifts that the man at the center of our political system could position himself as an exasperated but hopeful outsider.

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WASHINGTON — It’s ironic that President Obama could never be convincing as populist in chief. He had a modest upbringing — his family was on food stamps for a time — and he needed scholarships and loans to pay for his fancy education. He is no stranger to the struggles of everyday Americans.

By contrast, George W. Bush was born to Old Money and raised amid great wealth, privilege and power. Yet Bush was able to project an Everyman folksiness that made people forget his patrician heritage. Obama just doesn’t give off that guy-next-door vibe. Even if he were to roll up his sleeves, loosen his tie and start talkin’ like his predecessor, droppin’ his final g’s left and right, nobody would buy the act.

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WASHINGTON — If President Obama has decided to give up on health care reform, he should just come out and say so. Then we could all get on with our lives — those of us with health insurance, that is. But I don’t see how his talk about some sort of slimmed-down package, reduced to its “core elements,” could possibly inspire Democrats in Congress to do anything but run for the hills.

Republican Scott Brown’s victory Tuesday in Massachusetts, grabbing the Senate seat that was held for decades by the late Ted Kennedy, left Democrats rattled. Actually, frantic would be a better word. Thus far, Obama has said nothing that would help calm the waters — or help the party get out of what now can officially be called the Health Care Mess. If anything, Obama is making it messier.

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WASHINGTON — President Obama begins his second year in the White House with such anemic approval ratings, you’d think he was another Ronald Reagan: Among recent presidents, only the Gipper had fallen so low in the esteem of voters at this stage of his presidency.

In the end, things worked out rather well for Reagan — a landslide re-election victory, success in changing the course of the nation and the world, canonization by the Republican Party. In this context, the serenity of Obama’s political advisers is understandable. It has been a tough year, and the president has had to make a host of decisions that he knew would be politically unpopular. If history is any guide, these early approval numbers say little about where Obama will stand politically in 2012, much less how he will rate at the end of his presidency. The White House is right not to panic.

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WASHINGTON — Poetic justice is a beautiful thing. Republican Party grandees were all set to use Michael Steele in the most cynical way. Now it’s becoming clear that Steele has been using the users all along.

Republicans must have thought that electing Steele as their national chairman was a brilliant stroke. The 2008 presidential election had been a debacle for them. The Democratic Party was on top of the world, with the first African-American president taking office amid a national outpouring of good will. Among the mediocre field of contenders for the RNC job — at that point, after all, who would want it? — there was one intriguing option. Why not begin the process of rebranding and renewal by installing the first African-American party chairman?

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WASHINGTON — “Connecting the dots” is a lousy metaphor that creates unrealistic expectations. The phrase suggests that the only thing our intelligence analysts have to do is draw a line from the point labeled “1” to the point labeled “2” and so on, and soon they’re looking at the unmistakable outline of a terrorist plot. In reality, though, the page is so crowded with dots that they almost touch. Most are irrelevant, and not a single one is numbered.

The clues that would have alerted authorities to the Christmas Day underwear bomber were buried under mountains of intelligence data.

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WASHINGTON — Under new rules prompted by the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack, airline passengers coming to the United States from 14 nations will undergo extra screening: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. For our first quiz of the new decade, which country doesn’t fit with the others?

The obvious answer is Cuba, which presents a threat of terrorism that can be measured at precisely zero. Cuba is not a failed state where swaths of territory lie beyond government control; rather, it is one of the most tightly locked-down societies in the world, a place where the idea of private citizens getting their hands on plastic explosives, or terrorist weapons of any kind, is simply laughable.

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WASHINGTON — Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano’s initial assessment of the Christmas Day airliner attack — that “the system worked” — doesn’t quite match the absurdity of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” But only because she quickly took it back.

A system that allows a man identified to U.S. officials as a potential threat — by his own concerned father — to board a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with powerful explosives sewn into his underwear? That lets this man detonate his bomb as the plane prepares to land, igniting a potentially catastrophic fire? That depends on a young, athletic passenger to be seated nearby? That counts on this accidental hero to react quickly enough to thwart the terrorist’s plans?

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WASHINGTON — It’s pathetic to break a New Year’s resolution before we even get to New Year’s Day, but here I go. I had promised myself that I would do a better job of ignoring Dick Cheney’s corrosive and nonsensical outbursts — that I would treat them, more or less, like the pearls of wisdom one hears from homeless people sitting in bus shelters.

But he is a former vice president, which gives him a big stage for his histrionic Rottweiler-in-Winter act. It is never a good idea to let widely disseminated lies and distortions go unchallenged. And the shrill screed that Cheney unloosed Wednesday is so full of outright mendacity that, well, my resolution will have to wait.

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WASHINGTON — When all is said and done — and, yes, there is a bit more saying and doing to endure, which means that anything can happen — the health care reform legislation that President Obama now seems likely to sign into law, while an unlovely mess, will be remembered as a landmark accomplishment.

The bill making its way through the Senate by the slimmest of margins is imperfect, to say the least. But before listing its many flaws, let’s consider the measure’s one great virtue: For the first time, we will enshrine the principle that all Americans deserve access to medical care regardless of their ability to pay. No longer will it be the policy and practice of our nation to ration health according to wealth.

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