We learned a bit more about President Obama’s view of himself and the nation Tuesday night in his State of the Union address, and what we learned wasn’t particularly admirable.

First, we saw that he really does intend to carry his continued rhetoric of class warfare into the coming political campaign, pitting the well-to-do against the poor and the middle class, along with demanding tax-driven leveling that penalizes the productive for the sake of ideology and envy.

We also saw this unsavory slop being brewed in the stir that arose when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney revealed his tax returns for 2010 and 2011, disclosing he paid an investment tax rate of about 14 percent on his $45 million income over that two-year period.

Undisclosed by the critics was the fact that investment tax rates come on top of earnings already taxed as business profits. Romney’s real rate is probably about 45 percent, far above the 30 percent minimum “millionaires’ rate” the president demanded in his speech.

That’s a far higher percentage than Warren Buffet’s secretary likely pays on her estimated salary of $200,000 to $500,000, unless her accountant is utterly incompetent in filling out a 1040.

(Romney’s charitable contributions equaled his reported taxes, with more than $6 million of his income going to his church and many other causes. How many politicians decrying his tax rate give that percentage away?)

What the president offers instead of policies that liberate our job-creators is a bait-and-switch that diverts our attention from the government policies, laws, rules and regulations that hamper business growth.

Romney’s work for Bain Capital created tens of thousands of jobs, even if not all his projects were successful. Obama and his allies are waging an ugly and cynical campaign about that, which is in some measure a sign of their desperation. He cannot point to economic successes of his own, even though his party controlled Congress for the first two years of his term in office (and still controls half of it, at least for a few more months).

His stimulus targeted government jobs far more than industry, and his medical plan ranks even lower in the polls than his job-performance ratings.

Meanwhile, true entitlement reform that preserves current recipients’ benefits but offers younger people real options will have to wait until someone serious about reining in our super-trillion-dollar deficits launches “#OccupytheOvalOffice.”

Then we can hope that next year’s SOTU will be a far more interesting speech — and a far more hopeful one.

But the speech Tuesday actually worthy of national attention was Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’ Republican response, in which a man who knows how to produce balanced budgets told us, “The federal government now spends one of every four dollars in the entire economy; it borrows one of every three dollars it spends. No nation, no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.”

Daniels knows that demonizing success costs society: “Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say, ‘First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you’ll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love.’ “

And he also knows the cost of pandering to environmental radicalism, which Obama did in halting the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada: “The extremism that stifles the development of homegrown energy, or cancels a perfectly safe pipeline that would employ tens of thousands, or jacks up consumer utility bills for no improvement in either human health or world temperature, is a pro-poverty policy.”

Entitlements? “The mortal enemies of Social Security and Medicare are those who, in contempt of the plain arithmetic, continue to mislead Americans that we should change nothing. Listening to them much longer will mean that these proud programs implode, and take the American economy with them.”

In the end, Daniels noted, the tone of our politics has not been elevated by the rhetoric of social disunion: “No feature of the Obama presidency has been sadder than its constant efforts to divide us, to curry favor with some Americans by castigating others. If we fail to shift to a pro-jobs, pro-growth economic policy, there will never be enough public revenue to pay for our safety net, national security, or whatever size government we decide to have.”

As much as Obama disparages successful people, he seems to like to mimic their lifestyles, working hard at improving his golf game and taking frequent vacations at upscale locations like Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaiian beach resorts at taxpayer expense.

We should let him engage in those pursuits without the distractions that the presidency imposes on his hours of leisure.

M.D. Harmon is a retired journalist and a free-lance writer. He can be contacted at:

mdharmoncol@yahoo.com