David Brooks writes: Obama made a good start in the State of the Union address.

David Brooks writes in The New York Times:

If I were one of those fellows advising Barack Obama, I would tell him that . . . you need to distance yourself from the status quo. You need to detach from the Old Bull committee chairmen you foolishly affixed yourself to in your first year. You need to detach from all those deals with pharmaceutical lobbyists and earmark champions. You need to detach yourself from Washington’s ping-pong match of ideological overreach — as each party interprets victory as a mandate to grab everything.

You made a good start in the State of the Union address, I would tell him. In that speech, you began to reclaim the mantle of the permanent outsider.

First, you distanced yourself from the Democratic orthodoxy. You embraced some traditional Democratic policies, but also an eclectic grab bag of other policies that play well with independents: a spending freeze that excluded defense, nuclear power, offshore drilling, the elimination of a capital gains tax on small business, a fiscal commission, free trade deals and earmark reform.

Second, you distanced yourself from the old debates. You sidestepped the whole big-government-versus-small-government question. Instead of doing the liberal-people-versus-the-powerful shtick, you emphasized targeted tax cuts, deficit reduction and community bank subsidies.

Third, you distanced yourself from Washington morality. At times the speech was like a vice principal’s lecture to an unruly middle school classroom. You scolded Democrats and Republicans about excessive partisanship, pettiness and insider-dealing. You cast yourself as the sole coolheaded man in Gomorrah.

In short, you made it clear that you will not be going down with the Congressional Titanic. You took a few steps toward recapturing your image as the last thoughtful reformer. Now you have to embrace that role with a vengeance.

There aren’t going to be any big new policy initiatives this year anyway. You might as well cross the country on a Perot-like tour of consciousness-raising, complete with charts and everything.

The deficits are the issue around which everything else revolves. The mounting deficits both symbolize Washington’s institutional dysfunction and genuinely threaten the nation.

You want to cross the country screaming the facts. As you do, states like California and Illinois will be undergoing fiscal implosions to illustrate your ongoing point. You want to use the fiscal crisis as a wedge to change the way the whole system operates.

If you get a deficit-reduction deal, you break through the polarized rigidities that encrust everything else. You wipe clean the special-interest barnacles that encrust the tax code. You force the country to think in 30-year increments and deliver a blow to the tyranny of the news cycle. You force the country to accept common sacrifice. This is the issue that unlocks everything else. So will you establish your credibility and offer to raise taxes on the lower 98 percent? Yes, you can!

If the setbacks of the last year haven’t radicalized you about the sickness of our current political system, Mr. President, I don’t know what will. Are you really content to spend the year lobbying for tiny tax credits for ineffective training programs?