Even before Brown’s election, Republicans were signally unwilling to work with this president. Not a single House Republican voted for the president’s stimulus package last year, and Republicans in the Senate have so far been universal in their opposition to health care reform.

And Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, who is delivering the GOP response to Obama's speech, took a critical tone in prepared remarks.

"Good government policy should spur economic growth and strengthen the private sector's ability to create new jobs. We must enact policies that promote entrepreneurship and innovation so America can better compete with the world. What government should not do is pile on more taxation, regulation, and litigation that kill jobs and hurt the middle class," he said, according to prepared remarks. And he added criticism that Obama is piling up too much debt too fast.

"The amount of this debt is on pace to double in five years and triple in 10," McDonnell said. "The federal debt is already over $100,000 per household. This is simply unsustainable. The president's partial freeze on discretionary spending is a laudable step, but a small one. The circumstances of our time demand that we reconsider and restore the proper, limited role of government at every level."

It’s ironic that Obama is aiming so much firepower at small businesses, a group that arguably doesn’t like him all that much. A majority of small-business people are Republicans and likely don’t approve of the president, American City Business Journal polling has consistently shown.

But Obama is also facing an employment crisis. Though the economy is by most measures coming out of recession, it’s far from robust, and unemployment is hovering near 30-year highs.

Small businesses have traditionally done the majority of the new hiring in the U.S., creating about 60 percent of the new jobs. And the kind of innovation that turned into the Internet revolution, for example, started as small-business people figuring out new ways of working.

So, said Jason Furman, Obama’s deputy director of the National Economic Council, “It’s appropriate to focus on them.”

And issues that appeal to small business might also appeal to enough Congressional Republicans to get some bipartisan action. At least, that’s what Obama appears to hope for, returning to a campaign theme of rising above partisanship, according to his prepared remarks.

“We face big and difficult challenges. And what the American people hope—what they deserve—is for all of us, Democrats and Republicans, to work through our differences; to overcome the numbing weight of our politics. For while the people who sent us here have different backgrounds and different stories and different beliefs, the anxieties they face are the same. The aspirations they hold are shared. A job that pays the bill. A chance to get ahead. Most of all, the ability to give their children a better life,” Obama said.

The president’s proposals aren’t new. They’ve been coming out in dribs and drabs for weeks and even months. But for the State of the Union, Obama is trying to pull them into a coherent set of policies aimed at job creation.

And, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said, the problems the president faces aren’t new either. They’re the same problems he addressed last year with the stimulus package, which the administration claims saved 2 million jobs.

“A number of the challenges that we had we still have,” Gibbs said. So part of Obama’s mission in a speech that gives presidents their greatest opportunity to talk to the country directly is to reframe the debate and make the argument that the solutions upon which he was elected are still the right ones for a country in dire economic straits.

Over the coming days, Obama will be taking his message on the road. On Thursday, he travels to Florida to announce $8 billion for a high-speed-rail project. Next Tuesday, he’ll be in New Hampshire at a jobs event.