Obama aims to rise above 2016 in final State of the Union The White House will campaign for Clinton, but not in this speech.

People inside the West Wing have a vision of President Barack Obama’s 2016: he’ll take on the role that Bill Clinton played for him in 2012, the elder statesman and battering ram, laying out a fact- and figure-based case for why Democratic governing gets better results than Republican promises.

That’s coming, aides say. But not on Tuesday.


The closest Obama’s going to come to 2016 politics in his State of the Union is setting the grand vision and offering an optimistic, aspirational contrast to the doomsday at-the-barricades mentality that’s dominating the GOP primary race.

In what will likely be his final night with all the national attention focused on him, Obama’s taking a last shot at telling America what he thinks it can be, and trying to brand the future.

It won’t be a recap of his presidency, nor will Obama make the case for the third term that Clinton’s been insisting on the trail she doesn’t want. He also won’t spend much time talking up the good parts of his record to push back on what Republicans call the failed Obama-Clinton economy and foreign policy.

A speech like that, close Clinton allies say, would have been welcomed, and it would have reassured Democrats who are nervous that Obama doesn’t intend to throw himself into securing the White House for his party. Privately, some say they’re frustrated that Obama is promising a more aspirational speech when they’re focused on the nuts-and-bolts of winning an election.

There’s a lot, Clinton allies say, that they’d like to hear out of him.

“What is the state of the union? The state of the union is a hell of a lot better than it was when he stood there seven years ago,” said Tom Nides, a former deputy secretary of state under Clinton and an informal adviser to her campaign. “And he’s got to stand up there and remind people of that, because that can only be helpful to Hillary Clinton.”

But Obama’s got bigger things in mind.

The president initiated the State of the Union draft-writing process two months ago with instructions to his staff that he wanted this speech to be different from all the rest: no legislative agenda to set himself up for failure in front of a GOP Congress, no reflective legacy-thumping that would make him start to seem like the lame duck he’s desperate not to be.

The White House asked for input from the Cabinet and other agencies like usual, but Obama never intended to do a speech full of standard call-outs and name-checks. They even skipped the usual State of the Union-specific focus group testing, though regular White House polling continues to be run by the firm of Joel Benenson, who’s also now the chief strategist for Clinton’s campaign.

Obama will mention gun control, counterterrorism and climate change. But he won’t be running through how many uninsured people now have Obamacare, the unemployment rate that’s down to 5 percent, the housing and auto industries alive, a foreign policy that he’d argue has left the world in better shape than it seems when the news is full of terror attacks and North Korean bombs.

“The facts are on our side right now, and that is something that he is free and positioned to do very effectively,” said Matt Canter, a Democratic consultant at Global Strategy Group, which works for the pro-Clinton super PAC Priorities USA. “We get drawn so far away from facts, and candidates are not well-positioned to bring the conversation back to the facts.”

The Clinton campaign declined comment on what they’re hoping for out of the speech. And White House officials say the administration did not share drafts with the 2016 Democratic front-runner.

“Everything we do needs to be infused with the sense of possibility—that the choices we make now will impact the future,” a White House aide said, looking ahead to the speech.

“He will talk about who we are as Americans and focus on some consistent themes of his presidency—a country that adapts to challenges, that creates things, that believes that change and progress are possible,” the aide said.

But there’s a way that a speech like that helps Clinton, said Mo Elleithee, a spokesman for Clinton’s 2008 campaign who’s now the executive director of Georgetown University's Institute of Politics and Public Service.

“This is an important moment in defining his legacy. But it can also help her in two ways. By going out there and selling the past seven years, she doesn’t have to. She can stay focused on the future,” Elleithee said. “And, he can begin making the case to general election voters while she’s still in a primary. He can begin looking down the field before she has the luxury to, or before she’s allowed to.”

Others express more skepticism. They’re worried enough about getting through 2016 before they start looking past it.

“Now is the time,” Canter said, “for the red zone offense.”

