He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union,
I believe he failed there. He did not give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union. The State of the Union is: fractured. A bit less than half of the Union objects to the Fed's direction, a bit less than half agrees with the Fed's direction, and 10 percent or so claim to not know (this is my understanding; CountArach may find polls otherwise).

Instead, he focused on the next part:

...and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient;
50 minutes (or 5 pages of text) got devoted to that. To be fair, he's not the first to use the SOTU for this - it has a long and (respectable/notorious) history.

My objection to the speech is his assumption of the knowledge of american's needs, wants, and requirements. Just like Bush, he assumes that since he got elected, by whatever neferious means, he has some kind of mandate, an order he must perform, some obligation of action...

In my humble opinion, such perceived mandates are ephemeral. And manufactured. And America knows it. And Washington doesn't know it, or won't accept it.

We have our agents: soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, under fire on our behalf in much of the world. Yet scarcely 3 minutes of a 58-minute speech is devoted to their (OUR!) aims. Except to mention that "don't ask, don't tell" is going away - which he could enact singularly as CinC, needing neither Congress nor SCOTUS.

In short, I was not inspired. My just-laid-off-from-Wal-Mart-probably-gonna move-into-my-house son and just-deployed-to-Afghanistan-after-two tours-in-Iraq soldier/son, both watched the speech and found little hope for change. We're gonna keep fighting wars, and down-sizing , 'til we get it right. Apparently.