I sat in on a briefing yesterday where various "senior administration officials" explained the theory behind the State of the Union. When they were asked about shifting their focus to the future when the economy was so bad in the present, they explained that they got pretty much everything they thought they could get -- and, in fact, more than they thought they could get -- in the tax-cut deal, and it was time to let that work. Left unsaid is that they can't get anything more out of a Republican House, and so there's little point in begging.
Throughout the Obama administration and for many years before, certain Democrats have been obsessed with the idea that you should never, never ask for anything you can't get. They believe there is nothing worse than losing a vote in Congress. They advocate no policies they cannot immediately pass.
This means we preemptively compromise, starting all negotiations from the middle and pretending that is exactly what we want. It also means that after that, when we have to compromise again (since that's the nature of negotiation), we then pretend the new compromise is ALSO exactly what we wanted. As a political strategy this is occasionally useful, but mostly completely frakkin' insane. We look untrustworthy - hell, we are untrustworthy; we find ourselves standing for positions no one likes and rejecting positions almost everyone likes; and if a policy doesn't work out well, as with the economy now, we have nothing to fall back on. What's our excuse? We passed exactly what we wanted, didn't we?
All this is based on the idea that the American people will love us much better if we appear to have an endless string of victories rather than a) standing up for something; b) making actual compromises between what we want and what they want, like they keep saying they want us to; and c) being able to blame not-fully-successful policies like the stimulus on the need to compromise with our opponents. Evidence for the success of that idea is awfully thin.
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