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 Looking for real-life anecdotes to make the case for the proposals in his State of the Union address, President Obama turned to his own mailbox. 
 
 Eight of the guests who will sit in the House chamber as guests of the White House during Tuesday’s prime-time speech wrote letters that made their way to Mr. Obama’s desk, making them living, breathing examples of the policies he will discuss. 
 
 There is Rebekah Erler, a 36-year-old working mother who wrote to the president last March about the financial challenges she was facing while raising her young family. Ms. Erler, who introduced the president when he visited her hometown, Minneapolis, last June, has a story tailor-made for Mr. Obama’s new economic initiatives, including proposals to make community college free and to provide larger tax credits for child care and education and a new credit for families with two working spouses. 
 
 Ana Zamora of Dallas, another letter-writer, is a so-called Dreamer – brought to the United States illegally as a child by her parents – allowed to stay in the country and work through Mr. Obama’s 2012 executive action. Ms. Zamora’s parents, who have other children born in the United States, will be eligible for the president’s more recent unilateral move in November to extend such benefits to the parents of American citizens. 
 
 Not all of the letter-writing guests wrote directly to the president. Malik Bryant, 13, meant his letter for Santa Claus, whom he asked to bring him “safety” as his holiday gift. But a nonprofit organization redirected the letter to the White House, where the president saw and responded to it. 
 
 The president receives 10 letters each day in his briefing materials, hand-selected by his staff from the tens of thousands that come to the White House daily on paper and by email and fax. 
 
 The eight letter-writers are among 22 guests the White House has announced will sit with Michelle Obama in her box during the speech. Others include Alan P. Gross, the American released last month after five years of captivity in Cuba, and Scott Kelly, an astronaut scheduled to leave soon for a year aboard the International Space Station. 
 
 — JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS ||||| Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 One of the few concrete foreign policy suggestions in this year’s State of the Union address is a call for Congress to “show the world that we are united in this mission by passing a resolution to authorize the use of force against ISIL,” using the White House’s preferred acronym for ISIS. 
 
 Joshua Keating Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs and author of the forthcoming book, Invisible Countries. 
 
 As I wrote in December, the White House is still relying on the Authorization for the Use of Force, or AUMF, against terrorism passed in the days following 9/11 to justify the airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The president acknowledged more than a year and a half ago that the AUMF is long out of date. It’s particularly ill-suited to the fight against ISIS, a group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11 and is at war with al-Qaida, the group the authorization was designed to combat. 
 
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 Since the fight against ISIS began, the White House and Congress have been locked in an awkward dance, with both sides saying they want a resolution but neither taking concrete action to make it happen. “It’s a combination of the administration not being confident in whether it can get what it needs out of Congress and therefore not coming to Congress with a draft, and a Congress that isn’t eager to take up an issue that may later come back to bite them,” Rep. Adam Schiff of California told me. 
 
 The White House is worried a new resolution would put unwelcome restrictions on the war, such as, if some Democrats get their way, prohibiting “boots on the ground,” or if some Republicans get their way, calling for the targeting of Syrian military forces. And, for now, the current arrangement has worked out fairly well for the White House. It maintains it can rely on the old AUMF for its operations while blaming Congress for the lack of a new one. Members of Congress, meanwhile, can avoid taking ownership of a war in which success is far from guaranteed. 
 
 As the L.A. Times reported last week, though, the two sides came closer to an agreement over a new resolution at a recent meeting between Obama and Republican lawmakers at the White House. (Update: In a statement sent to reporters, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), sponsor of an earlier draft AUMF and one of the most prominent voices in this debate, said he was "disappointed [the president] did not signal an intention to send a draft to Congress for consideration" and that "congress as a whole will be better prepared to act with specific guidance from the administration.") The question going forward, and one that the sparse language in Tuesday’s address doesn’t answer, is whether any new ISIS authorization will revoke the previous AUMF, which has been interpreted far more broadly than the members of Congress who overwhelmingly supported it in 2001 could have imagined, and has been invoked to justify a decade’s worth of attacks against a wide range of terrorist targets in multiple countries. 
 
 Another question that remains unanswered: How narrow will the new authorization be? “We do not think an AUMF should include a geographic limitation,” John Kerry told Congress in December, indicating that the new rules could be just as broad as the old ones.
– In a State of the Union speech short on big surprises, one of the more talked-about moments came during a presidential ad-lib. Late in the speech, Obama said, "I have no more campaigns to run." When some cheers broke out among Republicans, Obama said, "I know because I won both of them." He got a round of applause and carried on. Alan Rappeport, New York Times: "But in one off-script moment, he flashed his notoriously competitive side." Joshua Keating, Slate: "Obama responded with an ad-lib that will likely go down in State of the Union history." Chris Cillizza, Washington Post: "I have no more campaigns to run....I know because I won both of them." -- Obama. WHOA," he tweeted. Brian Stelter, CNN: "If you wanted the media coverage of this #SOTU to concentrate on policy, 'I know because I won both of them' is not what you wanted," he tweeted.