Michele Bachmann will go toe to toe with the president in primetime, delivering a televised speech of her own following the State of the Union. This would be standard procedure were Bachmann her party’s choice to deliver their response. But the official job belongs to budget chair Paul Ryan, whose speech will now be judged against both Obama’s and Bachmann’s, making an already thankless task that much tougher.

The unorthodox double response threatens to undermine the party’s message and leave Republicans looking divided on a night where Obama enjoys the full force of the presidency and a mini-surge in public support buoying his own speech. Bachmann’s speech will be carried by the Tea Party Express online, inviting questions about whether House leaders are in tune with their base right as they’re trying to find their footing in the new Congress. Not surprisingly, Majority Leader Eric Cantor doesn’t sound enthused, questioning to reporters yesterday why networks are carrying Bachmann’s speech in the first place.

It’s not jut the visual image of a divided GOP that could create problems. Bachmann throws yet another prominent voice into the already crowded debate over Republican plans to cut the deficit. House leaders passed a symbolic resolution today calling for a return to 2008 levels of spending. But you’d be forgiven if it’s hard to identify the party's position on the deficit. Ryan himself supports much further measures, including privatizing Social Security and turning Medicare into a voucher program, but his ideas have not been endorsed by GOP leaders. Now you can add Bachmann to the mix, who put out a list of budget suggestions yesterday that included ending the Department of Education and transferring responsibility for highway spending to the states. Democrats have already gone out of their way this week to tie Ryan’s proposals to the broader party. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told reporters on Tuesday that Obama’s approach would contrast with Republican “plans to end Social Security and Medicare” even though Ryan’s legislation has few co-sponsors. Now with a national stage, Bachmann’s proposals will likely become fair game as well. Throw in a plan this week by the Republican Study Committee to make $2.5 trillion in cuts, far deeper than Speaker John Boehner has agreed to, and you have a complicated mix of messages on the party's core issue.

Of course, it's not just the GOP that's threatened by Bachmann's speech -- the risks are high for her own political standing as she looks towards a possible 2012 run for president. Ask Sarah Palin how her attempt at matching Obama speech for speech earlier this month went.

Plenty of observers have compared the latest Congressional fad of pairing up with members of the opposite party for the State of the Union to a high school dance this week (Kirsten Gillibrand and John Thune are the popular prom king and queen picks, for example). But participants were only too happy to extend the metaphor themselves this morning—and even push it back a few grades.

“There are no cooties to be had” between Republicans and Democrats, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told reporters at a press conference in support of their bipartisan musical chairs.

Nonetheless, she urged the media not to get too carried away with who was sitting where and miss the speech—while again cycling through another round of school imagery.

• Howard Kurtz: Obama's SOTU Sand Traps

• SOTU Live Chat with Howard Kurtz, Mark McKinnon, and More“It’s like going to the prom and ‘who’s wearing what dress?’” she said, “and to a certain extent this has been a little bit of a dating show...it reminds me a little bit of eighth grade.”

Others have already been throwing around similar language. Yesterday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) took to Twitter to make fun of the school dance aspect.

“So I don't have a date to SOTU,” he wrote. “Oh, how it is to be the ugly conservative.”

Mark Udall (D-CO), who was the first lawmaker to call for the symbolic gesture, said already 55 members had signed on but that he expected the final tally to be much higher. Congress is often likened to a class of children, but the comparison is rarely flattering. Udall himself conjured up an academic metaphor as a negative to poke at past speeches.

“I think we all believe the State of the Union has become more like a high school pep rally and we want to change the tone,” he said.

Of course, comity works within parties as well. I asked Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC), who ran against Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for her post and has been very critical of the Democratic agenda, whether it might be a nice gesture if the two were together.

“That would be a start,” he laughed. Unfortunately she’s already taken tonight, having agreed to sit with Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

UPDATE: Prom night drama continues. Pelosi just took to Twitter to reject Cantor's offer. She's keeping up the bipartisan spirit, however, by sitting with Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD).

It's a very special State of the Union Day in D.C. as lawmakers scramble to find bipartisan dates for President Obama's speech. A significant enough number of Democrats and Republicans will be sitting together to scramble the usual party lines and make for a more confusing game of "who is applauding what?"

The consensus is that the bipartisan pair du jour is Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and John Thune (R-SD) on the Senate side. [Politics Daily]

The feel-good vibe extends to the TV audience as well, apparently. A CNN poll shows a major increase in optimism about the direction of the country as the recovery picks up steam. [CNN]

Paul Ryan, the House budget chair, will give the response. Democrats are taking the opportunity to tie Ryan's deficit plan, which includes major changes to Social Security and Medicare, to the broader GOP, which has been hesitant to support it. [The Hill]

Tea Party Caucus founder Michele Bachmann is also delivering a response for some reason. In his response to the response to the response, Majority Leader Eric Cantor didn't sound too enthused by Bachmann's decision to undercut the GOP's official plan. [Weigel]

A White House reception for a mostly GOP freshmen class will be the first time some members get to meet the man they attacked in order to win last November—and maybe bring back some “civility.”

Tonight’s a big night for freshmen members of Congress, for many them it’ll be the first time they meet the President of the United States.

They will gather at a White House reception, and for many of the mostly GOP crowd, they will be shaking hands with the man they attacked in their campaign. But instead of a formal sit-down or airing of grievances, the event is more of a social gathering—a chance for the president to meet new members of Congress and, perhaps, use it as a unifying event, according to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

Rep. Michael Grimm (R-NY) says he doesn’t think he’ll be able to get into specifics with the president, but said he is “excited” about the meet and greet.

“I’m looking forward to working with him in the hopes that he’s looking to work with us really,” Grimm told The Daily Beast. “I’m hoping any talks I have with the President will be about working together and hoping that he has heard the American people and that they are looking for a more fiscally conservative agenda and we haven’t seen that so far.”

Grimm, who often went after Obama on the stump, says it won’t be awkward to now socialize with the president and says it will be “an honor and great privilege” to meet him. Grimm stresses, though, it’s more than just a meeting, it’s more about laying the groundwork for a future relationship. Forget that these people who gave Obama a “shellacking” November.

“The one thing that I am cautious about—and I don’t feel awkward about saying this—is he’s a magnificent orator,” said Grimm. “He’s one of the best speakers I think our country has ever seen…It’s the actions now that the American people and myself included need to see.”

Grimm added that because the freshman class is so large, the new members have the opportunity to bring back the much-talked about “civility” that he thinks Congress has been lacking.

In an interview earlier this month with The Daily Beast another freshman, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) mentioned this evening’s reception noting that the “time will come” for him to meet the president. But, when asked if he was excited for the meeting he answered, “I am excited to be up here to serve the American people.”

Clearly it may be more awkward for some freshmen than others.

George Allen is set to relaunch his political career this week, returning from several years in the private sector working for oil and gas interests to run for the Senate seat he lost in 2006.

Several years later, the popular narrative of that election has been condensed into one word: "macaca." Allen, seemingly unbeatable and already eyeing a presidential campaign in 2008 —some even considered him a frontrunner—called an Indian-American volunteer for his opponent a "macaca" at a rally and welcomed him to "America and the real world of Virginia." He subsequently plummeted in the polls, flailed about for the rest of his campaign looking to regain momentum, and ended up losing by a heartbreakingly narrow margin.

Certainly the "macaca" moment, a term that has become a synonym for politicians' racial gaffes in general, set Allen down the path to defeat. But it didn't just appear out of nowhere and it's worth remembering just what Allen has to answer for as he returns to public life. While "macaca" launched Allen onto the national stage for many Americans, he already was on probation with Virginia voters for a number of previous racial flaps. A major feature in The New Republican months before that incident documented his long interest in the Confederate flag, which he kept in his home as part of a collection and wore on a pin in his high school graduation picture as part of a self-described "rebel" image (the school was in California).

Then there were his Civil War proclamations. You may recall that recently Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell apologized—with Allen's support—for issuing a proclamation acknowledging Confederate history without mentioning slavery. But Allen made this an annual ritual as governor himself, referring to the Civil War in his own statements as a “four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights” and asking Virginians to acknowledge "the honorable sacrifices of Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens to the cause of liberty." His language didn't go unnoticed at the time either, attracting plenty of criticism from civil rights groups at the time. In his recent book, Allen apologized, but also accused his political opponents of exploiting the proclamations to attack him. Still, they “could have been worded better, I suppose," he told The Daily Beast last year.

It's important to note that these weren't significant issues only in retrospect after "macaca" —plenty of articles before the incident described Allen's race issues as one of his top liabilities and he was already trying to repair the damage with public apologies and efforts to reach out to the African-American community. That Allen was clearly aware of the reputation he had cultivated for racial insensitivity and was actively on his best behavior is what made the "macaca" moment and subsequent flare-ups—which included a strange and defensive response to news of his mother's Jewish ancestry and claims he used the n-word frequently in college—so irreparably damaging. It gave the impression that Allen's race problem was so deeply entrenched in his political persona that he simply couldn't let it go and still be George Allen.

Many conservative commentators fretted after Harry Reid was quoted in a book gushing over Obama's lack of "Negro dialect" that Democrats were hypocritical for not forcing him out given their condemnation of Allen. But, fairly or unfairly, individual gaffes only do real damage when they fit an established pattern and Reid had no history of inflammatory racial remarks—even the one quote came in the context of proudly supporting a colleague's bid to become the first African-American president. Backstory matters, and before Allen can move past his one "macaca moment" he needs to convince voters to forgive his several "Confederate decades" as well.

George Allen, of "macaca" fame, is looking to reclaim his old Senate seat. The man who beat him last time, Jim Webb, is on the fence about seeking a second term, however, so there may not be a rematch. [Politico]

Marco Rubio, the most prominent candidate linked to the Tea Party movement in the midterm election, may not join the Tea Party caucus in the Senate. [McClatchy]

Don't expect a gun control nod in the State of the Union tomorrow, writes Peter Beinart. [The Daily Beast]

A group of GOP lawmakers has upstaged Republican leaders’ cautious deficit plan with a proposal to cut spending by a politically explosive $2.5 trillion. Will the Tea Party let John Boehner get away with anything less now?

Tea Party leaders warned John Boehner long before he took the Speaker’s gavel: cut spending—or else.

With Republicans finally in control of the House, Boehner sought to keep the base on his side with a plan to knock $100 billion off the budget by returning to 2008 spending levels. But conservative activists have demanded a tougher approach from the start and the standoff only intensified this month when Republicans announced after taking office that their cuts would be closer to $60 billion after all. Now GOP leaders are facing yet another headache as an influential group of Republican lawmakers push for far more draconian cuts—so bone-deep, in fact, that they appear unrealistic and unworkable.

The problem for Boehner is that the budget cuts appear impossible to implement, politically or logistically.

This week the chair of the Republican Study Committee, which includes 165 GOP House members, released a plan to cut $2.5 trillion over the next decade. While Republicans have frequently resisted naming specific programs they planned to eliminate up until now, the RSC included a list of dozens of items on the chopping block totaling over $300 billion, including everything from funding for the arts to the D.C. metro. The scale of the cuts are pushing expectations among Tea Party activists to record highs.

“Our supporters across the country are already embracing the RSC's proposal and are already indicating they'd like to see the House Republican leadership step up to the challenge of reducing the budget by more than $100 billion this year,” Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, told The Daily Beast. She added that even the RSC’s plan was less than her ideal: an eventual return to spending levels from when President Clinton left office.

The problem for Boehner is that the proposal appears impossible to implement, politically or logistically. While multi-trillion dollar cuts are music to small government conservative ears, the RSC plan is vaguer and less comprehensive than it may first appear. It declines to touch mandatory spending at all, which includes entitlements like Social Security and Medicare and makes up about two thirds of government spending. Instead, it focuses all of its cuts in the one third of the budget devoted to discretionary spending—while exempting defense, which accounts for close to 60 percent of even that limited slice’s total.

So where are the other $2.2 trillion in cuts going to come from then? The RSC doesn’t exactly say. They hope to achieve their goal by capping all spending in this limited category at 2006 levels while getting rid of 15 percent of the federal workforce, but how these cuts are distributed (and whether they occur at all) is up to future sessions of Congress. And there are plenty of points where reality—and politics—are bound to intrude.

The most problematic example is the Department of Veteran Affairs, whose discretionary budget is taken up almost entirely by medical programs for soldiers. Given that we’re entering year ten of a war that continues to produce more wounded warriors every day, it’s no surprise that budget demands are rising fast—the VA currently treats 439,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, with another 500,000 expected to become eligible for help by 2013. Dropping their discretionary spending to 2006 levels would set them back from $60 billion in 2011 to $36 billion even as their responsibilities rapidly expand.

“Cuts to discretionary spending would be pretty devastating,” Tim Embree, legislative director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America told The Daily Beast. “Messing around with the VA budget would set back care for veterans by years.”

Needless to say, the visual of a hearing room filled with soldiers unable to find a physical therapy center or pay for prostheses doesn’t fit with most politicians’ re-election plans. That’s why Boehner specifically left veterans out of his own proposed cuts. Rep. Jeff Miller (R-FL), chair of the Veterans’ Affairs Committee, noted in an e-mail to The Daily Beast that the RSC plan wouldn’t dictate which agencies had to shoulder the burden of its overall cap on spending.

“It does not set limits specifically for veterans programs,” he wrote. ”I am committed to making veterans a priority and maintaining the necessary levels of services for our nation’s veterans.”

In practice, the VA likely would be protected under the RSC plan as well, but for every dollar politicians rule out, they have to find somewhere else to hit even harder.

Then there’s the Department of Energy which, unbeknownst to many Americans, is in charge of all of our nuclear weapons. In fact, maintaining the nation’s arsenal and getting rid of their resultant waste takes up 65 percent of their budget and a spokesman for the RSC told The Daily Beast that the nuke-related funding would indeed be off-limits to cuts. The department also helps back loans to build new nuclear plants, a longtime priority for many Republicans.

“I think it would be devastating to the nuclear industry,” Charles Ebinger, a senior fellow at Brookings specializing in energy, said when asked about prospective cuts. “If they really slashed it back, some of the loan guarantees and promises for the next nuclear plants might be scuttled.”

There are plenty of other politically perilous targets—the Department of Education’s numerous grants and scholarships, for example. President Clinton made political hay out of Republican attempts to cut education spending during his own re-election campaign, and Obama could easily follow suit. Widespread federal job cuts could also be tough to enact in practice—many Republicans argue that cutting government jobs will spur private hiring in the long run, but lawmakers will have some tough choices to make when it’s the government office in their own district that’s picked to get the axe. Some of the concrete cuts proposed by the RSC are problematic within the party as well: Republicans are particularly nervous about the biggest source of proposed savings, privatizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which many economists warn would wreak havoc on the housing market.

Bottom line, proposals on the scale of the RSC’s will have to overcome the same obstacle that every deficit plan eventually runs into: In theory, the public loves to cut spending to balance the budget, but quickly changes its mind when things turn specific. The Tea Party may not be so understanding if Republicans follow the same route.

Deficit rhetoric coming from both parties has many progressives worried that President Obama might use the State of the Union to call for working with the GOP to cut Social Security benefits. On Friday, TPM reported that 33 members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent a letter to Obama calling on him to use the address to definitively shut down any talk of reducing funding for the program.

Meanwhile, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee is pressing the issue with new ads targeting Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) for his support for raising the retirement age —a signal of what's to come if Democrats decide to join him?

The White House's deficit commission endorsed a plan last year to raise the retirement age in order to put the entitlement program on sounder fiscal footing and their proposal could serve as a blueprint for bipartisan negotiations. Social Security has traditionally been considered a political third rail for presidents, but the recent uptick of interest in deficit reduction has increased speculation that either or both parties might endorse tinkering with entitlements despite the risk.

Republicans dared Harry Reid this week to hold a vote on health care repeal in the Senate. Democrats are plotting to turn the tables on the GOP by forcing them to vote on repealing the most popular parts of the bill, like new benefits for seniors and protections for sick children, piece by piece. [TPM]

Well this is weird. Not only is Al Franken apparently buddies with incoming Tea Party firebrand Rand Paul, but Franken is promoting the news on his own website. [Al Franken's Own Website]

Joe Lieberman's gone, but there are still a handful of moderates in the Senate driving the Democratic base up the wall. Could any of them be threatened by a primary challenge from the left? [The Daily Beast]