By now, it should be fairly obvious that I didn’t take on healthcare because it was good politics,” said President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last Wednesday. This remark, like the many other one-liners Mr. Obama delivered that evening, elicited laughter from Democratic legislators in the audience and outright guffaws from Vice President Joseph Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (Mr. Biden and Ms. Pelosi, seated customarily behind the president, were so ardent in their mirth they often appeared to chuckle a beat ahead of the punchlines.) But Congressional Republicans were not amused, and what this particular remark showed was that Mr. Obama remains temperamentally ill-suited for battling his opponents. Because, by now, it should be fairly obvious that passing a comprehensive healthcare reform bill that includes a public option would have been very good politics indeed; just as surely as failing to pass the toothless bill Democrats actually came up with was the very definition of bad politics.

The president didn’t mention that purgatoried healthcare bill until midway through his speech on Wednesday night, and instead his focus was job creation. Personally, we’ve found it hard to take seriously his sudden finding of Jesus in re populism. Mr. Obama clearly thinks Timothy Geithner is doing a heckuva job as Treasury secretary, and his odious choice to head the Federal Reserve, Republican Ben Bernanke, was reconfirmed on Thursday, a day after the State of the Union speech—albeit in a record vote of feeble endorsement. And so while last week’s pageantry has been widely praised for its supposed inspiring oratory of “I don’t quit” and “We don’t quit” (the New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzerg called the speech “downright Nabokovian,” whatever that might mean) what struck us most was the banality of Mr. Obama’s policy proposals, which amounted to the usual scraps—nothing more, nothing less—that presidents traditionally hand out on these ceremonial occasions.

Giving “families a $10,000 tax credit for four years of college and increas[ing] Pell Grants” is, for example, not objectionable. But by any reasonable accounting standards, not to mention moral ones, these numbers are totally insignificant next to the billions allocated to our ongoing War on Terror. Mr. Obama spoke, three times, of the “two wars” America is waging. The thing is, he knows better than anyone—he is, after all, our new Decider—that the War on Terror has been expanded under his administration to more than a couple of fronts. Is this what he meant when he boasted in his speech of having made government more “transparent”?

On Wednesday the president also called for a three-year spending freeze, declaring that no programs would be exempt save for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security (all very popular with voters) and—wait for it—anything falling under the amorphous category of “national security.” Now, we’ve passed through an airport checkpoint as recently as Sunday, and we can assure you that the Transportation Security Administration could stand to trim some fat too—nevermind the cretinous private corporations shooting up foreign citizens on our government’s dime.

Ultimately, what was most disconcerting about his State of the Union address was that Mr. Obama continues to have faith in Republicans, believing that eventually they’ll come around and do what’s best for the nation. This explains why the president’s men had apparently made no contingency plans for losing a Massachusetts senate seat to the GOP last month, just as it explains why Mr. Obama asked Republicans on Wednesday to “try common sense” and seemed to mean it. Republicans, to paraphrase a certain stupid movie from our youth, cannot be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until Democrats are finished. As political wisdom goes, this is fairly obvious.