Mess with the Republicans. Keep up momentum. Accept that it takes more than a speech in front of a joint session of Congress to get most Americans, and certainly much of the Washington establishment, to care anymore.

That’s the logic that led the White House to kill the State of the Union.


Not completely, of course. Next Tuesday night, the 30 million-or-so people who tune in will be the biggest single audience President Barack Obama is likely to get all year — though nowhere near the 67 million Bill Clinton drew in 1993 or the 52 million Obama himself got for his first one in 2009. He’ll use the speech as an opportunity to assert himself, remind people that though Republicans are enjoying the majorities in Congress, he’s still here.

( POLITICO's State of the Union coverage)

But as for the State of the Union tradition of unveiling big announcements for a year-ahead agenda, Obama’s done with that. The country’s been done with that for a while, aides say, and the White House has finally caught up.

They believe they’ve now redefined the State of the Union model, not just for this year and next but for the next couple of presidents at least.

Most of what’s in the speech they’ll have already announced as part of Obama’s two-week lead-up tour. White House aides say that may be it — they’re not interested in making big legislative asks for the GOP to reflexively shoot down, nothing on par with last month’s surprise restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba.

After all, they know they can count on the president getting that block of prime time and occupying the front pages of the newspapers next Tuesday and Wednesday pretty much no matter what they do.

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“It still has to be interesting. But you don’t have to be making as many pre-announced announcements in order to drive the coverage,” a White House aide said. “The coverage is already there.”

The rest of what they’ll spend the year doing, White House aides say, they’ll parcel out in announcements over the rest of the year. That includes a budget proposal released two weeks after the speech — actually on time this year, with the books sent to the printer this week — that will include, among other things, the big reveal for how they propose to pay for the free community college plan Obama announced last week in Tennessee. It will also include a rush of other new spending proposals, all generated by a president and West Wing staff who believe they’ve got enough goodwill building about the economy to dispense with the tough-choices, belt-tightening rhetoric.

Jennifer Palmieri, the White House communications director who’s done 11 State of the Unions between Clinton and Obama, argued to other senior staffers that the idea of building everything into one speech, in one hour (plus however many additional minutes the president goes on for) of one night didn’t really make sense in 2015.

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This year, the aide explained, they’re testing a proposition: “that we can get a little more attention for these things if we space them out.”?

“With the new Republican Congress, they didn’t want to cede the first two weeks of January,” said an outside person familiar with White House thinking,” adding that the plan reflected “the White House’s belief that there’s no reason to give them an open playing field and wait.”

The second part of the plan was issuing veto threats: for every major piece of legislation being considered by the House and Senate, White House press secretary Josh Earnest is already on record saying the president won’t sign. While Republicans were busy debating stuff that wasn’t going to happen, White House aides figured, they’d run the president all over the country and on the Internet talking about what they were trying to get done.

That meant the latest swing for this White House in its administration-long struggle between using the one messenger it can always count on to draw a crowd and the anxieties of overexposure.

“It is a much bigger part of our consideration in terms of how we’re using the president’s time,” another aide involved with the planning said. “The media environment has changed that much this year as well.”

Obama signed off on the plan just before he left for his Hawaii vacation.

Logistics for the presidential travel were a little more complicated than usual, with workers at go-to event sites like high schools and college campuses out on vacation for the holidays. Finding enough compelling material to do events around was another problem. They know they’re starting to run thin on big things the president can reasonably claim he’ll get done that’ll make much of a splash. It’s not like they have an endless supply, White House aides tend to admit in their less guarded moments.

Brian Deese, deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, shepherded the policy development through the fall, but it wasn’t until the flight out to Honolulu that Obama met with his chief speechwriter, Cody Keenan, to start sounding out the speech. At this point, all the policy is set and a full draft is done, though it’s still getting final edits from the president’s senior staff.

The State of the Union still matters as a way to focus policymaking for the year ahead. The same way there wouldn’t be a Christmas season without Dec. 25, there wouldn’t be much of a State of the Union pre-sell without the speech to focus people around. Broadband access, cutting methane emissions and a $900-per-year break on some mortgages — those are all nice but not exactly thrilling enough to generate much interest among people not primed to think of this as a moment when the president’s rolling out big things.

Not as many people watch the State of the Union as they did when Ronald Reagan was around. But then again, the first White House aide said, during the Reagan days, he’d have a few prime-time news conferences a year to repeatedly put him before the country.

This White House is still fuming about not getting the networks to buy into the president’s immigration executive actions speech at the end of November, and they know at this point they may not get another national audience after Tuesday before the State of the Union next year.

“People build up the State of the Union,” the aide said. “There aren’t a bunch of other opportunities where that’s happening.”