President Obama surely deserves to relax this weekend and enjoy the Super Bowl after an arduous week in which he prepared and delivered his fifth State of the Union message, one the White House admits set forth a rather limited agenda, and then took to the hustings for stops in four states on the campaign trail that has become his natural home. The president might have been spared the chore had Woodrow Wilson, in 1913, not overturned Thomas Jefferson’s 1801 decision to deliver only a written message, a move explicitly designed to avoid mimicking the pomp of Britain’s King’s Speech. Thanks to the Wilson and the forward march of communications technology we now are treated to the spectacle of congressmen vying for seats on the aisle so that they might touch the flesh of the president as he enters the chamber.

Obama did have to make a last-minute change in his message when a new study revealed that one of his major themes, that economic mobility is “declining” in the United States, is not true. The president knows that inequalities of income and wealth have never troubled Americans quite as much as electorates in other countries because of the belief that anyone can rise above his or her birth-station by dint of hard work, with the current occupants of the White House prime examples of that upward mobility. So he hoped to attack inequality of opportunity. When the president was into the nth draft of his speech, Raj Chetty and Emmanuel Saez, professors at Harvard and the University of California, respectively, reported that their study of tens of millions of tax records proved that economic mobility has not, as the president was saying, “declined.” Instead, it has remained essentially unchanged for the past twenty years, reducing support for the idea that a crisis demanding government action is upon us. It would, of course, be good if mobility had increased, but stability beats decline by a long shot.