Everyone knows Obama is good at giving speeches. Not just good: great. He knows it. We know it. We expect him to deliver and, with only one or two exceptions in the last couple of years, he's always delivered. So the text, tone and delivery of last night's address wasn't surprising in the least.

What was surprising was the scope.

Nobody can accuse President Obama of playing "small ball." Unlike Bill Clinton who, after failing to pass sweeping healthcare reform early in his first term, seemed content with mostly nibbling around the edges of policy for years, Obama is promising rapid, wholesale changes in the way we live our lives; from the kind of cars we drive and energy we use to the way we get our healthcare and our education.

It's also not surprising that the public appears to have received the speech very favorably. Obama is an excellent salesman, and he packages his vision in the most appealing way possible. But it's also worth noting that the power of Obama's persuasiveness is rooted in his likable demeanor and calm disposition. It's easy to envision Obama getting equally high marks from the public had he put forth a passionately conservative argument last night rather than a passionately liberal one.

Still, the laundry list of Obama's promises is so great that it invites skepticism: he's going to create millions of jobs, mend the broken banking system, restore the credit markets,  save the auto industry, reform the healthcare system and the public education system, and revolutionize energy creation and consumption in America.

And despite having already spent more than a trillion dollars in his first month, with promises of much more to come to accomplish everything on his list, President Obama is also going to slash the budget deficit in half. All in four years.

Oh, and he's going to cure cancer, too.

Obama can often get away with such grandiose rhetoric - like the time during the campaign when he suffered a spasm of arrogance by citing his winning the Democratic nomination as the moment history would look back on "when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

But President Obama also continues to set the bar extremely high for himself and his administration. Whether that turns out to be smart politics or not remains to be seen,  because at some point reality is going to catch up with his rhetoric.