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In his State of the Union speech, Barack Obama pulled a brilliant campaign strategy out of his hat. He never directly criticized the Republicans, even when he broached the topic of a divided Washington; he did not compromise on the Buffet tax and also promised to step up regulations of the financial sector; and he talked about different ways to create new jobs.

In the end, he painted a vivid portrait of a united America: imagine black, white, Latino, gay people all fighting together in battle. (Well, everything is in the delivery). Obama’s main theme for the upcoming presidential campaign is emerging: unity.

This is a great piece of rhetoric — and it uncovers the flaws in the Republican strategy. Obama’s message of unity only works in opposition to what Republican have said and done in the past few years. The debt-ceiling debacle made Obama temporarily unpopular, but it especially made Congress ratings crash. Moreover, Republican responses to the demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement have by and large been callous and scornful.

Finally, the Right has failed in putting together a positive and galvanizing message. Both sides were given the same material: a bad economy, high unemployment. Obama turned this into a message of solidarity and unity. The Republicans hammered us with negative advertisements criticizing the Obama presidency and with cries to “take our country back“. The GOP front-runner, Mitt Romney, has wrongfully blamed the bad economy on the president’s policies.

Because the GOP has spent so much time on attacking the President, it has not had time to craft its own narrative — which gave Obama the opportunity to write it up for them. By portraying himself as the cohesive leader and dismissing those accusations of class warfare as lacking “common sense,” the president implicitly accused the Republicans themselves of being divisive.

Define yourself before your opponent defines you: this is a basic rule of the campaign game. Even against an incumbent president who was in office during the worst of a recession, even with unemployment at 8.5 percent, no party in campaign can afford to stand for nothing at all.

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