It sounded conciliatory, even friendly, brimming with the outward trappings of a shift to the center, but President Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union speech was, at its core, an unmistakably partisan challenge to congressional Republicans.

Obama, facing a chamber full of Democrats and Republicans mingling together in a show of bipartisan comity, began by telling the new GOP majority in the House that “we will move forward together or not at all.”

There were concessions aplenty as well — free-trade deals, a simplification of the corporate tax code, an earmark ban he once ridiculed and a push to get colleges to accept the ROTC on their campuses. Plus, he mostly avoided mentioning a host of issues that would offend them — comprehensive climate change legislation and gun control, to name two.