Don’t Miss Tonight’s State of the Union Address

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President Obama will use his State of the Union address Tuesday evening to make a renewed case for an overhaul of the tax reform, one of a host of “common sense” ideas advisors say he’ll offer to shore up the American economy and tackle the growing deficit. That message comes as Obama is also beginning in earnest to ask voters to give him another four years in Washington. And as he presses for what the White House calls “tax fairness,” he was offered a new political weapon from a potential Republican rival, Mitt Romney.

The former Massachusetts governor’s campaign on Tuesday detailed his income and tax burden for 2010 and an estimate for 2011. He had an effective tax rate of $13.9% in 2010 and 15.9% in 2011 on income of more than $20 million each year. Senior White House advisor David Plouffe said in a round of interviews Tuesday morning that Romney’s tax rate illustrates the “tax reform we need.”

Obama’s speech is intended to serve as a bookend to the major speech he delivered in December in Kansas, where he said the American middle class is at a “make-or-break moment.” He invoked a Republican predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, in railing against growing income inequality. It is indeed an election year, and Obama’s address to Congress — his sixth overall — is not expected to include the kind of laundry list of policy offerings that previous addresses did.  And he’ll quickly take his message on the road with the traditional post-State of the Union barnstorming tour, which this year is a three-day itinerary of likely electoral battlegrounds in the fall.

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