State of the Union 2014 fact check

The president's real audience wasn't the lawmakers in the chamber.

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address prodded Congress to act on issues like immigration and economic inequality, with a warning that he won’t hesitate to act unilaterally if lawmakers drag their feet.

But he real audience wasn’t the lawmakers in the chamber. The president was trying to sell his policies and his leadership to tens of millions of people watching at home.

With that rare, outsized audience comes the temptation for the president to put some spin on his arguments that might not otherwise fly or gain traction in Washington.

Here’s POLITICO’s  analysis of some of the key parts from Obama’s speech and where the truth may have been shaped or even stretched in the process:

Obamacare numbers game

Obama: “More than 9 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance or Medicaid coverage.”

Technically, Obama’s right – those are the latest figures released by the Obama administration. In the context of the speech, though, a casual listener could get the impression that all those people got health coverage for the first time because of Obamacare – and that’s not certain yet.

There’s no question that enrollment has been going better since the launch. Last week, the administration announced that 3 million people have signed up for private coverage through Obamacare’s health insurance exchanges. That’s a huge leap over the 106,000 who had signed up in October, the first month of enrollment.

The catch, though, is that it’s not yet clear how many of those people were uninsured – and gained coverage for the first time – and how many were just replacing old insurance, such as policies that were canceled because they didn’t meet Obamacare standards.

There were probably some uninsured people among the 6 million Americans who have gained coverage under Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program since October, but again, it’s not clear how many of those signups can be directly linked to Obamacare.

USA = No. 1?

Obama: “And for the first time in over a decade, business leaders around the world have declared that China is no longer the world’s number one place to invest; America is.”

That depends on which business leaders you talk to.

The White House cited a A.T. Kearney survey as the basis for Obama’s remark, noting the U.S. indeed landed at the top of the global consulting firm’s list for expected foreign direct investment based on the responses from 300 executives in 28 countries.

But the U.S. doesn’t fare anywhere near as well in other prominent business analysis.

Forbes’ annual report on the best country to do business put Ireland at the top, while the U.S. landed at No. 14. It fell thanks to Washington-driven business regulations, “excessive tax burden” and the Federal Reserve’s “easy-money program, which has distorted prices and risked long-term inflation.”

India, Brazil, China and Canada all outpaced the U.S. in an Ernst & Young survey released in November of 1,600 senior executives from more than 70 countries. And the Milken Institute – which measures countries on 67 variables, including economic fundamentals and regulations — put the United States at No. 22, behind Hong Kong (No. 1), Estonia (No.11) and France (No. 21).