Sitting down with reporters this morning, House Speaker John Boehner offered his pre-State of the Union thoughts on President Obama’s recent political maneuvers — and how. Via CNN:

“To do the kind of heavy lifting that needs to be done, I don’t think he’s got the guts to go do it,” Boehner told a group of television reporters and anchors in a breakfast ahead of the president’s State of the Union address. …

“He doesn’t have the courage to take on the liberal side of his own party. I’m sorry but it’s just clear as a bell to me,” said Boehner. …

“I think he’d love to have Nancy Pelosi as speaker and Harry Reid as majority leader for his last two years in office. Go back to the inaugural address. He knows that all of that liberal agenda he laid out, he knows none of that is going to happen as long as we have a majority in the House,” said Boehner. …

“I’ve tried repeatedly to come to agreement with the president. Every time I’ve gotten burned,” said Boehner.

Really, though: Why spew all of those grandiose hyper-liberal agenda items on which you know you won’t be able to push through any major legislation as long as Republicans continue to control the House? And that, I suppose, is the ultimate goal: Make your own agenda more mainstream by constantly lamenting those extremist, hostage-taking Republicans’ do-nothing obstruction of it, eventually fever-pitch their unpopularity, and then get them all booted out of office in 2014 so you can buck all of modern history by convincing voters to elect the Democratic Congress you’ll need at your disposal to pass your legacy-building partisan wish list.

But President Obama’s highfalutin ambitions, which voters resoundingly agree are low-priority, are going to keep on taking a back seat as long as he keeps doubling down on top-heavy and expensive policies that perpetuate an economy that continues to struggle beneath sluggish growth and high unemployment; hence the now-annual tradition of “pivoting” back to jobs and the economy for the umpteenth time.

…House Speaker John Boehner said he doubted President Obama would deliver substantive policy prescriptions to jumpstart the sluggish economy and deal with a looming debt crisis in his State of the Union address tonight.

“I’m not real optimistic that the president will address those subjects in a way that the American people expect him to address them…but hope remains eternal,” Boehner said.

That makes two of us.