President Obama’s first State of the Union address came at the end of the most harrowing nine days of his young Administration. On January 19th, a Republican won the Massachusetts seat that had been held for nearly half a century by Edward M. Kennedy, thereby depriving the Senate Democrats of the sixtieth vote they need to pass legislation. A headline on the Web site of the Village Voice summarized the situation tartly and smartly: “SCOTT BROWN WINS MASS. RACE, GIVING GOP 41-59 MAJORITY.” In the aftermath, as the Brookings scholar Henry J. Aaron wrote in National Journal, “the White House and many Congressional Democrats seemed almost as shattered psychologically as the Haitians were physically after their catastrophic earthquake.”...