Politico previews the State of the Union:

When President Barack Obama steps into the House chamber Tuesday to deliver his second State of the Union address, ambience will trump substance.

In his speech, the president will talk about jobs, the deficit and the future of the nation's troubled economy, but most of the attention is going to be on the theatrics in the room.

What does “the attention” even mean? Whose attention? As measured how? Politico doesn't say. I suspect most of the country -- if not most of the reporters at Politico -- will pay more attention to the president's comments about jobs and the economy than to who John Thune is sitting with.

A new CBS News/New York Times poll on national priorities finds that 43 percent of Americans think Congress's top priority should be job creation -- more than twice as many as named any other issue, and more than three times the 14 percent who named the deficit the top issue. That's consistent with other polling conducted over the past year, and a reminder that the public cares about jobs, even if the Beltway media seems to prefer to focus on anything else.