The 2012 presidential election season has now kicked up a notch, fueled by the rhetoric in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address, a composite of themes that are already resonating on the campaign trail.

Obama hit the road yesterday to sell his program to the public, voters who — if anyone doubted the political nature of the speech — happened to be in key battleground states. Now in the midst of that three-day tour, Obama is touching down in Iowa, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Michigan. So far he’s been reinforcing his manufacturing initiatives, which sound good to voters in areas with especially high unemployment.

And many of these voters, who live in areas with some of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates, also may respond well to his proposal to make refinancing easier for families teetering on the brink of losing their homes.

But some of his other speech topics, already losing prominence in the national debate, should be of particular interest to Hawaii. Obama spent a fair amount of his 64-minute speech on energy security, a concern felt acutely in the islands, where 90 percent of our energy comes from imported oil.

Environmentalists who want to discourage growth in fossil fuels were undoubtedly chagrined to hear the president extol the tapping of natural gas reserves, even with the caveat about keeping an eye on the chemicals used in the extraction process known as "fracking."

What was encouraging, however, was the administration’s resolve to pursue a clean-energy initiative through the Defense Department, a move that could have implications for Hawaii. The crux of it: allowing development of clean energy on enough public land to power 3 million homes. Obama called it "one of the largest commitments to clean energy in history."

In Hawaii, this should mean the acceleration of efforts by the military to capitalize on solar energy resources as well as substituting more biofuels for imported petroleum in power generation.

If Hawaii’s military communities could reap a share of this investment, the projects could provide the template for civilian "green power" generation as well, advancing the goals of the federal-state Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative launched in 2008. If the state is to reach its target of increasing its renewable-energy share to 40 percent of the entire portfolio, it will help to have Hawaii’s extensive military installations on board.

Finally, Hawaii advocates for higher education improvements can find common ground with Obama in the president’s plan to enlist community colleges in job retraining, expand work-study opportunities to college students and extend the tuition tax credit.

At the same time, the president seems intent on keeping tuition costs in check by withholding some federal funds to colleges that fail to control tuition rates, which have been rising unsustainably. This should ratchet up the pressure on the University of Hawaii system and other institutions to think twice before raising tuition, and to find better ways to combat inefficiency and waste.

Political realities dictate that most of the agenda laid out in the State of the Union won’t be enacted in the near term. But some of Obama’s initiatives that directly affect Hawaii — especially his energy and education plans — could get rolling by executive order, bypassing a divided Congress.

If nothing else, hearing Obama clearly articulate his governance priorities and approach in Tuesday’s address is useful for delineating the choices for voters in November’s elections, among the most pivotal this nation will face in decades.