The president needs to use the speech to jump-start his second term. SOTU: How far will Obama go?

It’s been the main White House talking point all year: If Congress can’t get its act together and pass legislation, President Barack Obama will do what he can on his own.

The State of the Union address Tuesday night will reveal whether Obama is serious about testing the limits of his executive powers or content with using them as a threat.


The president has typically positioned himself as a consensus builder and tried repeatedly to find middle ground with Republicans, with little success.

On a range of domestic policy issues important to Democrats, Obama needs to decide how far he’ll go, whether it’s using his executive powers or his political capital in a high-stakes election year.

( WATCH: POLITICO’s issue-by-issue SOTU preview)

Here are five issues to watch:

1. Executive actions: real or hype?

The West Wing insists Obama is ready to use his unilateral authority to an extent that hasn’t been seen in the past, perhaps on infrastructure, the minimum wage, climate change and education.

It remains uncertain how substantive he can be. White House officials have long said that executive actions are no replacement for passing bills through Congress because acting alone will always provide more limited relief.

Officials have been trying to straddle the line between ruling out Congress altogether and holding out hope that lawmakers will do more than they have over the last year.

“He’s an American citizen, and it stands to reason that he might be frustrated with Congress, since most American citizens are,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday.

“That doesn’t mean that we can’t get things done with Congress,” Carney added. “He’s also very optimistic.”

( WATCH: Obama at the State of the Union over the years)

2. Play it safe on immigration

The guiding principle on immigration reform: Do no harm.

The White House appears set in its strategy of maximizing its options within Congress. Immigration reform advocates say White House officials have told them Obama won’t threaten to take unilateral action to cut back detentions and deportation — at least not yet. They remain optimistic that House Republican leaders still want to act on immigration, providing a sliver of hope that Obama can accomplish something big in a year of low expectations of Capitol Hill.

The last thing Obama will want to do is antagonize Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is expected to release an outline of immigration principles to his caucus this week — a step that signals a level of seriousness that didn’t seem possible only a few months ago. If the president were to attack Republicans for not doing anything sooner or threaten to use his executive powers if they fail to act, Obama could risk a backlash.

That means the message Tuesday is likely to echo last year’s State of the Union address: Illustrate the urgency to deal with the issue. Talk up the economic benefits. Applaud bipartisan efforts to come up with a solution.

“We are looking for quality, not quantity when it comes to immigration,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “When we are this close to a bipartisan breakthrough, tone really matters.”

( POLITICO Magazine: The State of the Union curse)

3. Minimum wage, maximum politics

Ask progressives what they want to hear from the president, and one initiative, in particular, gets mentioned more than others: an executive order raising the minimum wage for government contractors.

Tuesday morning, the White House announced Obama would do just that, raising the minimum wage for federal contractors from $7.25 an hour to $10.10.

Fifteen senators, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and a group of House members, led by Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), had sent letters to the president urging him to exercise his executive authority.

The president will also call on Congress to pass legislation that would raise the minimum wage for all workers, something he would not be able to do by executive action. The issue polls well. Surveys released this month by CBS News, Quinnipiac University and the Pew Research Center/USA Today found that three-quarters of Americans support the wage hike.

( Also on POLITICO: Searching for an Obamacare shout-out)

In the text of his speech, Obama will have to balance how much further he wants to go in advancing the issue and energizing his base against the damage he could do to red-state Democrats — particularly in Senate races where the party’s on defense — by appearing to go too far.

Some Republicans say the order exceeds the president’s power.

“I think it’s a constitutional violation,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said on CNN Tuesday morning. “We have a minimum wage. Congress has set it. For the president to simply declare ‘I’m going to change this law that Congress has passed,’ is unconstitutional. He’s outside the bounds of his Article II limitations.”

4. Washington’s deficit gap

Obama gave prime real estate during his past State of the Union speeches to deficit reduction and entitlement reform.

Don’t expect the same treatment Tuesday.

Some Senate Democrats who attended a White House meeting with the president this month assume that he’ll tout how the deficit has been cut in half since 2009, from $1.4 trillion to $680 billion. Obama complained to the caucus that he hasn’t received enough credit for the savings achieved so far.

The issue for Democrats isn’t whether Obama will propose some type of executive action, it’s whether — or how far — Obama will go in reaching out to Republicans, particularly on entitlement reform.

The president has shown more willingness than many in his party to trim Medicare benefits by moving to a less generous inflation calculator. Will he renew the offer?

Some vulnerable Democratic incumbents, who view the issue as a political loser, would prefer that Obama drop his push for entitlement changes or at least downplay it heading into the midterm elections.

After all, Democrats argue, voters have always cared more jobs and the economy. A new Pew Research Center survey found that for the first time in Obama’s five years in office, “deficit reduction has slipped as a policy priority among the public.”

5. No hit-and-run on health care

Obama may actually dwell a little longer on Obamacare this year than he has in the past.

The speech is coming at the right time for the White House. HealthCare.gov is largely fixed for consumers. The administration sacked CGI, the contractor that botched the website. Three million Americans have selected private health insurance plans, with millions more expected by the March 31 deadline.

Senior Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill say they don’t view Obamacare as the political liability that Republicans believe it to be. The West Wing wants Democrats to embrace the issue, not shy away from it.

A good indicator of the White House’s sincerity will be the strength of the president’s Obamacare defense Tuesday. Obama will have to strike a positive tone about the law without sounding as though he’s declaring “mission accomplished,” because there is still a lot of work to do.

The age mix isn’t right yet, with too many older adults and not enough younger ones. The early sign-ups in the exchanges may not include a lot of actual uninsured people, although some have probably been added through Medicaid. Insurers are still waiting for the “back end” of the website, the part that handles their payments, to be built.

Health care didn’t occupy a lot of time in Obama’s three State of the Union addresses since the law was signed. In 2011, Obama acknowledged that the new House Republican majority hated the law, said it can always be improved but vowed never to go back to the days when insurance companies could turn people down because of pre-existing conditions. In 2012 and 2013, Obamacare got a couple of quick sentences, and that was it.

The goal this year is simple: Tout the successes, acknowledge the work that still needs to be done, and energize the base without losing credibility with the rest of the country.

Reid Epstein and David Nather contributed to this report.