Obama 'came out of the closet' in his big speech

Poor President Obama. Did you catch his State of the Union address? How embarrassing. Somebody forgot to tell him he's a lame duck.

Instead of doing what everybody expected him to do, instead of appearing with his tail between his legs, acknowledging how badly Democrats got crushed in the midterm elections and congratulating new Senate leader Mitch McConnell, Obama acted like he owned the place, which, in many respects, he still does.

Showing more backbone than we've seen in the last six years, Obama's cocky, unspoken message to congressional Republicans was: I'm still president of the United States. You can't get anything done without me. So we might as well work together. Here's what our priorities should be. Now, stop playing silly political games and get to work.

With that, President Obama gave his best State of the Union speech to date and, by far, the most populist. Indeed, if you missed the speech, you missed a historic event: Barack Obama came out of the closet – as a progressive! During most of it, if you closed your eyes, you might have thought it was Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren giving the speech.

Having clawed our way out of the recession, Obama argued, we are once again on solid ground. The economy is strong. We are now free "to write our own future." And we should do that based on a whole new set of priorities: Over the last six years, the top 1 percent has done very well. Now it's time to help the 99 percent – according to what the president, coining a new phrase for income inequality, calls "middle-class economics."

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Just look at what he proposed as the agenda for the next two years to boost the middle class: two free years of community college for every high-school graduate, six weeks of paid maternity leave and seven days of paid sick leave for every American worker, raising the minimum wage, paying women as much as men for the same job, expanding early childhood education, creating thousands of jobs by rebuilding America's infrastructure, and raising taxes on the 1 percent to give the 99 percent a big tax cut.

At the same time, President Obama reaffirmed his commitment to close Gitmo, renewed his call on Congress to end the embargo against Cuba and actually asked Congress for a new authorization of force agreement for the war against ISIS. He closed with a strong pitch for action on global warming, expressing the hope that "this year, the world will finally reach an agreement to protect the one planet we've got." If that's not a progressive agenda, I don't know what is.

Immediately, naysayers dumped on the president's plan, pointing out how unlikely it was that any of his proposals would win the support of the 114th Congress, which happens to be true. Congressional Republicans are so out of touch with the real world they continue to oppose raising the minimum wage, which is supported by 73 percent of Americans in the latest Pew Research Center poll, or Obama's plan to offer two free years of community college – with a 60 percent approval rating in last week's Huffington Post survey.

But focusing on dim prospects in Congress, no matter how true, misses the point. President Obama was doing something much more meaningful than just putting a set of proposals before this hostile Congress. He was laying out a bold populist agenda that will dominate political debate for the next few years – all the way through the 2016 elections and beyond. He set out to change the political landscape. And he's already done so.

Overnight, fretting over the Keystone Pipeline, Mitch McConnell's pet issue, seems trivial by comparison. Nobody's talking about that anymore. President Obama has raised the stakes. The new issue is middle-class economics. Even leading Republicans outside of Washington recognize that. In his remarks to the RNC last weekend, Mitt Romney lamented: "The rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse, and there are more people in poverty than ever before." And Jeb Bush said the purpose of his new PAC was "to support leaders, ideas and policies that will expand opportunity and prosperity for all Americans."

Thanks to President Obama, from now through 2016, the new question is: Who do you stand with – the 1 percent or the 99 percent? That's a tough question for most Republicans to answer.