On Tuesday President Barack Obama used his State of the Union address to frame the 2012 election as a debate about which political vision best offers the chance to maintain the bedrock middle-class aspiration that opportunity and hard work can provide every citizen the ability to raise a family, send children to college and retire in modest comfort.

"The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive. No challenge is more urgent. No debate is more important. We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by. Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules," said the president.

The president's political challenge is formidable. Though the fragile economy is slowly improving, about 13 million Americans remain unemployed. Meanwhile, federal deficits continue to soar. If the election is simply a referendum on whether the economy has sufficiently improved, the president is in trouble.

But elections are not referendums, they are about policy choices and in this election the choices are stark.

President Obama, as leader of the Democratic Party, envisions an America in which the government is a partner in creating jobs, sets and enforces rules to assure fair market competition and consumer protection, maintains the infrastructure necessary for commerce, protects the environment and provides for those in need.

In contrast, the Republican Party depicts the government as the enemy of the people. Though the party has yet to pick its standard-bearer, clear themes have emerged.

Republicans want little regulation of the markets, persuaded that unfettered competition creates jobs and somehow confident that the abuses that contributed to the economic collapse and Great Recession will not return. They oppose tax increases, even on the wealthiest, under the guise that the money must be kept in the pockets of these "job creators," all evidence to the contrary a decade into the Bush tax cuts. Government cutting alone, the Republican candidates contend, can reverse federal deficit spending. A popular target is public assistance for the poor, with emerging GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich dismissively calling Mr. Obama the "food-stamp president."

The other top contender for the Republican presidential nomination, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, has become Exhibit A in the regressive nature of the current federal tax system. Mr. Romney and wife Ann made $27 million in 2010 - the top one-10th of 1 percent of all taxpayers - including interest from millions of dollars in a Swiss bank account and tax-friendly Cayman Island partnerships. The couple paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent, about the same rate a middle-class household making $80,000 could expect to pay.

Citing such unfairness, President Obama called on Congress to codify the so-called "Buffett Rule" as law, named after billionaire Berkshire Hathaway chairman Warren E. Buffet, who maintains the rich should pay more taxes. Under the proposal, people making more than $1 million a year would pay a minimum effective tax of at least 30 percent.

The American public, we suspect, will be responsive to this argument, but only if the president offers these tax policies with a purpose beyond simply punishing the rich and redistributing wealth. The president did so, once again offering Republican House Speaker John Boehner the opportunity to negotiate a grand compromise. In exchange for changing the tax code so the wealthy pay more, President Obama said he is willing to negotiate cuts in entitlement spending, a primary driver of deficit spending.

We are disappointed the president again did not endorse the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction committee he appointed. Pushing Congress to adopt its fair, but tough medicine - higher tax revenues and sizeable spending cuts - would put Republican deficit-reduction rhetoric to the test.

As things stand, the tax changes proposed by the president, his call to block tax benefits for companies that move jobs overseas, and his job training and infrastructure investment proposals, have virtually no chance of passing the Republican controlled House. But they do set the stage for an increasingly assertive president to make his case for re-election.