When it comes to ensuring working families have the bread-and-butter basics, the United States is an outlier, there’s no doubt.

One Senator — freshman Tom Udall of New Mexico — is trying to change Senate Republican’s obstructionism by putting the focus back on governing rather than the crippling rules which have led, in a pretty direct way, to American decline.

In last night’s State of the Union address, Obama only touched on health care reform briefly. He made it clear he wants something done, but left Democrats scratching their heads about what the path forward should be.

The Maverick was in a particularly bi-partisany mood last night.

Apparently everyone in the White House learned the wrong lesson from the Massachusetts election. It’s not that the country loves Republicans, it’s that they hate DC insider deal making. You can’t claim that you’ll “end the outsized influence of lobbyists” one night and then give them exclusive access you consciously try to hide from the press the next day, and expect that people will find it credible.

The Obama White House has certainly been better about transparency than George Bush’s, but their commitment seems to be to the idea rather than the spirit of transparency. The selective release of visitor logs only goes so far; they’re incomplete at best. The whole point of requests for release of the logs was to shine light on deals that had been cut, and yet the White House has adamantly refused to provide any information on them.

Lack of transparency with regard to deals cut in secret is one of the factors that has made the public mistrust the administration’s health care bill. Release of those records could do much to allay many fears.

Both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid released statements last night thanking President Obama for his renewed commitment to health care reform, and both vowed to get something done. But Pelosi made news earlier in the evening in a series of sit-downs with various journalists. She is now favoring a dual-track approach to health care, where the major deal is still done through the reconciliation sidecar process, and other pieces that cannot be added or fixed in reconciliation get done in standalone bills.

While it’s perhaps a subtle rhetorical point, it is, to me, a stunning revelation of the way in which the Obama Administration still fails to see how the banks should be punished, because their fraud devastated all these families. Obama fails to see that housing has not just an upside–investment, jobs, growth–but also a huge downside of crumbling communities as one after another neighbor gets evicted from their home.

Republicans appear to have documents linking Ben Bernanke to a decision to give the backdoor bailouts at AIG despite staff recommendations. They are very specific about which documents show this and they want them made public. If they are made public before the confirmation vote, Bernanke is obviously in a lot of trouble. But there’s a much worse scenario.

Obama’s SOTU speech was highly political while pretending not to be. And it contained a backhand criticism of the dysfunctional Senate.