My State of the Union advice to the current President would be: remember that being President is different from being a candidate. It seems as though you did not get that on Inauguration Day, like some of your predecessors. Your street-smarts, so attractive when you were campaigning, led you to take on healthcare reform, then your corporate brain let you hand it to Congress. Ugh. Now, you're teeing up the banks, sensing another good fight. Wrongitty-wrong!
That is a candidate's populist fight at best. At worst, the "populace" sees you and Wash DC as the problem now, because they see all of you as having been enablers of the whole banking mess. Plus, you lose points for continual whining about your incompetent predecessor! Does anyone remember Lincoln's predecessor? Rise above.
A President's relationship with the People is a unique one: not the same at all as a CEO's relationship with customers. It is much, much deeper than that. Lincoln knew it was about our collective spiritual values, about our nation's soul, not just votes, not just our purse. Only great Presidents can rise above or go around the clamor. They suffer great loneliness due to their only-ness.
You still have time, but not much. The Fifty-State Union is very fragile at the moment, one more big corporate lie or one big violent event away from another steep descent.
When you write your speech, try to look out on Pennsylvania Avenue with Lincoln's eyes; forget Rahm, Beck and all the rest. Forget "legacy." That's a term for a history pole where we stick most former Presidents who desperately wanted everyone to love them.
Can't be done.
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