Here are a few clips from insightful commentaries on the president's State of the Union Address on what President Obama had to say about the federal budget and the economy.

Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research:

The most disappointing aspect of the speech is that it largely skipped over the current economic crisis. This may reflect a view that there is little that Congress will agree to do at this point. But it still is unconscionable to accept the idea that 25 million workers will go unemployed or under-employed, with millions more losing their home, because of the economic mismanagement by the country's leaders.

The first stimulus was signed into law by President Bush at a time when the unemployment rate was just 4.8 percent. It is difficult to believe that a Democratic president will sit back and do nothing when the unemployment rate is 9.4 percent. The unemployed should have been featured prominently in the State of the Union address. They are suffering enormously for the greed and incompetence of others.

Andrew Leonard, Salon.com:

We heard a lot about grand goals that everyone can get behind -- reinvigorating education, reinvesting in infrastructure, remaking the tax code --but are going to be fiendishly hard to execute. Especially when you consider that the president also called for a four-year budget freeze on discretionary spending.

Come on -- the numbers ust won't work. If you're going to cut $400 billion over the next five years, then the cash that you're going to have available to invest in high-speed rail, or biomedical research or clean energy -- all great things, name-checked with relish by Obama -- is just going to be too small to make a difference.

Ezra Klein, The Washington Post:

The question that gets asked of every investor is the same: "How much?" Investments, after all, primarily matter for how much capital they give their beneficiary access to. But "how much" was a question that President Obama studiously avoided answering in last night's State of the Union. And without knowing what Obama is actually asking from Congress, it's hard to know what his vision amounts to. Yes, it would be good "to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world," and yes, public policy has a role in helping us do that. But a small commitment to public investment is very different than a big commitment to public investment. Obama, after all, is not the first president to make competitiveness a theme of his State of the Union. The question is whether he'll be the first to actually do something serious about it.

Jim Tankersley, NationalJournal.com ($):

"We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time," he said, in remarks prepared for delivery. "We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business. We need to take responsibility for our deficit, and reform our government. That's how our people will prosper."

Much of that language could have been lifted directly from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers. So could most of the concrete economic proposals Obama offered later in the speech, including increasing infrastructure spending, lowering corporate tax rates, and boosting exports through free-trade agreements with countries including South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.

[...]

The shift appears to underscore a belief, by Obama and his economic team, that a divided federal government will offer limited options to spark the creation of the hundreds of thousands of jobs per month that economists say the nation needs to bring down the unemployment rate. Mostly, that’s because House Republicans are unlikely to approve any major new spending plans to stimulate demand.

So, Team Obama seems to have concluded, the best chance for more stimulus is to coax businesses to invest some of the nearly $2 trillion currently sidelined on corporate balance sheets in new workers or equipment."

Stan Collender, Capital Gains and Games:

In fact, other than the promise to veto any appropriation with earmarks, which was more an attempt to be the macho president Americans seem to love than anything else, the two big budget issues on the immediate horizon weren't mentioned. There were no threats or concessions, no predictions of dire consequences, the words "shutdown" and "default" weren't used, and, what probably was most important from the administration's perspective, no budget red meat for the GOP and tea party types to devour.

That doesn't mean the debt ceiling and CR won't soon be the big problems we expect them to be, only that the president was able to get through the SOTU without making them THE issues of the evening and today's topic #1. The administration didn't back itself into a corner.