1. Obama’s text is 6,700 words. Clinton’s 1996 SOTU was, if I count right, 500 words shorter. And it took an hour and 15 minutes. Bush in 2004: 5,400 words.

2. Obama is citing the roaring recovery of the stock market, and indeed, it is an indicator of something important: its recovery was due to the pricing in of the 2010 anti-Obama tsunami and the extension of the tax cuts.

3. He can continue to try to make the case that government spending is equivalent to private-sector investment, but it didn’t work for him before, to put it mildly. And at a time when his poll numbers were much higher.