Washington is gearing up for President Barack Obama’s first official State of the Union address and bloggers are trying to predict how the night will go.

TPM’s Brian Beutler calls tonight’s address “the X-Factor,” saying Obama’s comments could have a impact on continuing negotiations for health overhaul legislation, which Beutler reports are coalescing around one plan: “moving ahead with the Senate bill once it’s clear that it will be changed through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.”

Ezra Klein says that many health overhaul supporters are waiting on the administration, and that Obama and his staff are conflicted about next steps: 

The wild card in all of this is Obama himself. And the hope of many reformers is that the White House will play that card in tonight’s State of the Union. But as of last night, the language of the speech wasn’t finished, and no one seemed certain of where the president would finally come down. …But everyone agrees on one thing: Tonight’s speech is the most important of his young presidency, and it will be the most revealing of his career. Does he stand and fight for a health-care bill he believes to be a historic and necessary step forward? Or does he back away from it, letting some gestures toward his commitment to the issue stand in for the determined leadership — and the political gamble — that would represent real commitment to the issue?

Bob Laszewski predicts that Obama will “just jabber in a way no one can figure out which course he really supports.”  However, Laszewski continues, “In my mind, the smart political move for Democrats is to call the Republicans out on their offers to be bipartisan by putting a deal on the table Republicans couldn’t refuse.”

Critical Condition’s David Grazter wonders which persona Obama will adapt for the speech:

Which Barack Obama will take the stage for tonight’s State of the Union Address? Will it be candidate Obama — with a return to his 2008 focus on affordable, bipartisan, sensible health-care reforms? Many Democratic activists are lobbying for the alternative: They hope President Obama will adopt a more combative approach that’s even more liberal than his 2009 persona. … If President Obama returns to his 2008 persona and seeks the bipartisan middle ground, there would be many winners, and few losers. You’d see a simple, cost-effective national market for health insurance, modeled on the benefits enjoyed by members of Congress.

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum looks at media reports previewing the speech and laments, “This really doesn’t sound like good news. If Obama isn’t willing to step up and take ownership of passing the current plan, what chance is there that Congress is willing to get out on a limb and take the risk itself? Not much, I’m afraid. I sure hope Obama and his advisors screw up their courage on this and do the right thing before the end of the day.”

And the New America Foundation’s Joanne Kenen proclaims, “It’s time for President Obama to channel his inner Truman.”

Meanwhile, for the more casual observer, The Huffington Post and The Daily Caller (often billed as the conservative answer to HuffPo) both created drinking games to keep you occupied while awaiting any health care proclamations. Excerpt: “If Obama says ‘Bipartisan’ or ‘Bipartisanship,’ the back section of the bar yells ‘Yes,’ while the front section yells ‘No.’ Whichever side is louder should take a drink.”  Or you can play “President Bingo” from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The news that President Barack Obama is proposing a two-year discretionary spending freeze has triggered chatter about issues of federal spending and reducing the deficit, that then, of course, dovetails back to health reform.

For instance, Daniel J. Mitchell on Cato@Liberty writes that some critics “will correctly note that this is like going on a drunken binge in Vegas and then temporarily joining Alcoholics Anonymous.” Others point out that because entitlement programs like Medicare are exempt, the plan doesn’t matter much. But he contends that “even a partial freeze would be a semi-meaningful achievement.”

Igor Volsky also writes about the proposal for the Wonk Room noting the endorsement of Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., during an appearance today on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. But Bayh also criticized the president for spending too much time on health reform instead of the deficit. Volsky takes exception with Bayh’s either-or framework. “Bayh is wrong to suggest that health care reform is antithetical to reducing the nation’s $1.4 trillion deficit. Health care reform would compliment the administration’s new focus on deficit reduction by slowing the fastest growing part of the deficit.”

And that endorsement for reform brings us back to the bloggers’ continuing efforts to handicap the prospects of legislation.

David M. Herszenhorn set the tone today when he reported on the New York Times Prescriptions blog that the White House and congressional Democrats “are considering a hardball procedural maneuver known as budget reconciliation to adopt a health measure, despite losing their 60-seat super majority in the Senate.” The blogosphere was quick to react (again) to this idea — with cyber-reflections touching on the intraparty squabbling about how or whether to proceed, as noted by the New York Times. One point of general agreement, though, appears to be that whatever happens next, it will not be easy.

University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack on The Treatment blog urges the House to pass the Senate bill and the fix its “significant shortcomings through the reconciliation process.” But he also offers a reality check. “Virtually every health supporter I know supports the general strategy” but “the issue bears discomfiting similarities to the Arab-Israeli dispute. The contours of the ultimate solution seem relatively straightforward. The tactical roadmap is much more obscure.”

Robert Leszewski offers an entirely different take. He says that the idea of using reconciliation is “as dead as the original House and Senate health care bills.” His recipe: First focusing on tax credits for small businesses and then trying to help the individual market. “Add to that a modest Medicaid expansion, the albeit tepid cost containment parts of the current bills such as the pilot programs and giving CMS more authority to implement them, modest insurance reforms like ending rescission and funding for high risk pools, proving good faith with Republicans by including tort reform, and we have a bipartisan down payment on health reform.”

And Jonathan Cohn, also on The Treatment, points out that health reform could get a second wind: “It’s going to take heroic political efforts, given the number of Democrats suddenly skittish about supporting such a bill. And it’s not clear whether the Hill’s strongest reform advocates are getting the kind of political help they say they need from the White House.”

As Washington awaits the State of the Union address this week and congressional decisions on the health overhaul legislation, many bloggers are focused on what to do if reform is revived or are involved in the post-mortem.

Karen Tumulty at Time magazine was in Massachusetts to watch Republican Scott Brown campaign successfully for the Senate seat formerly held by Edward Kennedy. She found health care front and center on voters’ concerns. “They were unsettled by the mounting costs of their state’s program and even more so by the process they saw going on in Washington. Rather than being drafted with the common good in mind, they said, the health bill was turning into a series of backroom deals. … As a veteran of the Kennedy political operation put it, ‘They think there’s a lot coming out of Washington — and none of it is for them.’”

Ezra Klein offers a different take on such backroom deals — with the help of one of his readers who says other major legislation, including the Clean Air Act, included major concessions to secure votes. “The Nelson deal may be galling, but the media has done the public a real disservice by pretending that it’s rare.”

In terms of moving forward, Jeff Goldsmith, on the Health Care Blog, offers a suggestion to President Barack Obama on what strategy to adopt for health reform:  “The crucial thing is that the President must rigorously limit what’s in the bill to things that directly reduce the uninsured population with as little collateral fiddling as possible, or which create immediate, tangible benefits for people than can be explained in, at most, two PowerPoint slides, and do it in about 300 pages of legislation.”

Sam Stein at Huffington Post suggests Democrats want more White House involvement: “Frustration is mounting among Capitol Hill Democrats over what they say is the White House’s lack of direction in how to resolve a potentially crippling impasse in health care reform negotiations.”

But Keith Hennessy says some of the proposals for going forward don’t make sense. “Some in the House are floating the idea of splitting up either the House or Senate health bills into component parts and passing them individually. … This strategy does not work substantively.”

Tevi Troy on Critical Condition scolds Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., for suggesting that Democrats sought Republican contributions for the health package and instead praises the offer by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., to work on a bill if the Democrats will start over again. “Durbin is making the mistake of confusing amendments, many of which are technical, with a serious discussion of the bill’s basic architecture. … In spurning McCain’s offer, Durbin is insisting on maintaining the same process that led to the Democrats’ embarrassing loss in Massachusetts last week.”

For something a little lighter, take a look at Tim Noah’s posting at Slate. He is running a contest for readers to come up with a “plausible path to revive” the legislation.

Bloggers continue to regroup after a major boomerang in the health care debate this week with the election of a Republican to the Senate from Massachusetts.

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein writes, “the part of this that was predictable was the press building a narrative around either success or failure. It’s Democrats who appear to have chosen — and I use that word advisedly — failure rather than success. Though I imagine that if Barack Obama could actually pull the party together and convince Congress to pass the Senate bill with modifications, that would get a fair number of stories about the back-from-the-brink-of-death administration.”

Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky argues that if Massachusetts Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown “believes that Americans should not have to finance other states’ reform efforts, he should return the federal dollars that subsidize Massachusetts’ Medicaid expansion,” which is estimated at $385 million annually.

Looking toward a scaled-down effort, Time’s Karen Tumulty says, “The lesson has been that, unless you have pretty much everyone covered, insurance reforms won’t work.”

Heritage’s Rory Cooper thinks conservatives have plenty of ideas.  He says it’s “critical that conservatives continue to offer alternative solutions to the health care and entitlement problems that our nation faces,” and offers a handful of current priorities, such as like state-based experimentation with reform.

But The Treatment’s Harold Pollack is still fighting: he and law professor Timothy Jost penned a letter — that attracted the signatures of more than 40 other health policy experts — channeling Winston Churchill: “The Massachusetts election was a setback. Democrats still have large majorities in both the Senate and the House. We’ve heard worse. It’s time to act.”

Indeed, The National Review Online’s Robert Costa speaks to Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., who says Democrats are looking at a reconciliation bill strategy, and continues, “I’ve spoken with many Democrats and the message is this: They’re not ready to give up. They’ve waited their entire adult lives for this moment, and they aren’t ready to let 100,000 pesky votes in Massachusetts get in the way of fulfilling their destiny. They’ll look at every option and spend the next four or five days figuring it out,” Ryan tells Costa.