Front Row Washington

These days Washington is not known for bipartisanship, but every now and then a breakthrough is made.

So it is noteworthy that Vice President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and Senator John McCain, a Republican, are appearing together at a forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday.

The occasion is an annual event staged by the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University in McCain’s home state.

Both Biden and McCain have long experience in foreign policy and national security matters. Biden is a former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and McCain has long served on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

They also have a long history in national politics. Biden ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 in a race ultimately won by President Barack Obama, who later that year defeated McCain, who was the Republican nominee.

If the State of the Union speech is the artisanal homebrew of the political year, State of the State addresses are buying tall boys in bulk.

History suggests that President Obama will deliver 7,000-odd words in his address. So far in 2013, governors in 44 states have laid out nearly 200,000 words of State of the State stock-taking. Carving this rhetorical thicket into what’s relevant to national politics and what’s not provides a survey of support for current policies, a sense of how new proposals may be received and a reminder that states churn with concerns far beyond the issues that will be wedged into primetime TV. Most used words in each 2013 State of the State address

Education and the economy dominate the 10 most-used words in each State of the State address . Governors riffed on one broad economic story this year — and Obama is sure to follow suit — of recovery from the financial crisis with a long road ahead. To hear governors tell it, the turnaround relied on state commitments to hard budgetary choices and careful rebuilding to overcome inaction in Washington, D.C. Obama must convince the nation, particularly the middle class, that he can wrangle Washington to prime the nation for growth amid sequestration and gridlock — perhaps with an emphasis on infrastructure and clean energy projects, which regularly featured in this year’s state addresses.