Both sides, just not at the same time

Jennifer Steinhauer has an article in The New York Times about Obama's speech:

It was, for a moment, Bizzaro World, with Republicans giving the president of the United States a standing ovation, while Democrats, in large part, remained firmly fixed in their seats as he expressed his desire for new trade agreements. And it was a brief respite for Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and majority leader. He had spent much of the day talking about the need for conciliation, but had, for the previous twenty minutes, become more and more agitated as the speech went on, furiously taking notes as President Obama ticked off a list of tax cuts and programs he claimed that Republicans had supported.
For all the talk about the need to tame partisanship, both chambers of Congress put on a relatively full display of it, with Democrats hooting and clapping at Obama’s remarks about taxes, entitlement programs, and teachers, and Republicans leading the charge when the talk turned to veterans and regulations.
Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was first into the chamber, wearing a lavender tie, tan and bright white smile. He was followed by Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who was immediately set upon by a freshman Democrat, followed by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, who stood with his hands folded in front of him, pensive, speaking to few.
Unlike the State of the Union, when Democrats and Republicans sat together to show good will and cheer, members sat largely by party this time, as the room braced with anticipation for the speech. Oddly, former Representative David Wu of Oregon, a Democratic who resigned under the cloud of scandal before the August recess, sat with a young girl toward the back of the chamber, as others more or less avoided him.
Republicans were divided between those who criticized the president before he had uttered a word and those who reached with tentative hands toward an olive branch, citing the exhaustion of the American public with perpetual partisanship.
After the speech, Cantor said he liked some of the president’s proposals, including one to provide tax relief to small businesses, and would try to “peel off” such elements and pass them separately. However, Cantor criticized Obama for not specifying how he would pay for the new initiatives. He also complained that the president had offered his proposals on a “take it or leave it” basis, presumably referring to Obama’s pledge to take his case “to every corner of this country,” beginning with Cantor’s hometown, Richmond, on Friday.
Representative Emanuel Cleaver II, a Democrat from Missouri and chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, hailed that part of the speech, saying it would “energize the base” of the Democratic Party and enhance the president’s prospects for re-election.
Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, also had election plans in mind, but with a different twist. Sessions sent a plan to all Republican House candidates, declaring the start of the 2012 campaign season and encouraging them to criticize the president often.
A handful of House and Senate Republicans decided the president’s speech did not merit their attendance at all, even though Speaker John A. Boehner discouraged boycotts. “I have encouraged my colleagues to come tonight and to listen to the president,” Boehner told reporters. “He is the president of the United States, and I believe that all members ought to be here to do this. Doesn’t mean they’re going to.”
There were some notable guests on hand though, many of them corporate chief executives, the presumed creators of jobs. Representative Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, invited Henry Juszkiewicz, the chief executive of the Gibson Guitar Corporation, to highlight the fact that two Gibson work sites had been raided by federal agents, apparently in search of illegal, partly finished, wooden guitar fingerboard blanks from India. Since the visit, Juszkiewicz has become a walking, breathing, Republican talking point against excessive regulation.
The first lady, Michelle Obama, invited her own business people including Kenneth I. Chenault, the chairman of American Express.
The Republicans presented no official response to the president’s speech, with Boehner suggesting that his party did not want to get in the way of the desire of many Americans to watch the first game of the NFL season rather than be “forced to watch some politician they don’t want to listen to.”
Reid had scheduled a post-speech vote on a Republican resolution to disapprove the increase to the debt limit; it failed on its first procedural vote, with 52 Democrats opposed. The inconvenient vote had an icing-on-the-cake quality for Reid, as it forced Senator David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, to stay in Washington rather than flee to his home state to watch the Saints-Packers season opener, as he had said he would.

Rico says politics does make strange bedfellows...