Analysis: A better economy, a more hostile Congress

Susan Page | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Obama's combative tone in State of the Union address USA TODAY's Shannon Rae Green goes over the State of the Union Address highlights with USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page.

WASHINGTON — If his predecessors had delivered on their State of the Union initiatives, President Obama would have driven to the Capitol on Tuesday night in a city filled with hydrogen-powered cars, in a country girded against nuclear attack by a protective shield, in a world in which cancer had been cured.

But he didn't. Despite the grand aspirations of George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, none of those things actually has happened.

So perhaps the standard used to judge Obama's activist proposals in this year's State of the Union Address shouldn't only be whether they are likely to be enacted during the final two years of his White House tenure. Whatever the immediate prospects for Obama's ideas about raising the capital gains tax and bolstering tax credits for working families, the president was laying the groundwork for an emerging and long-term debate.

He was trying to shape a conversation that will continue through the 2016 presidential election and beyond: Now that the economy is finally on a stable footing for the first time since the Great Recession came crashing down in 2008, how can its benefits be expanded to include middle-income workers who still feel squeezed? How can the promise of the American dream be revived?

"The shadow of crisis has passed, and the state of the union is strong," Obama declared, saying the nation had "risen from recession." "It's now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next 15 years and for decades to come. Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well? Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?"

The response in the House chamber reflected, as is now common, the partisanship of the day. While everyone united in applauding Obama's salute to U.S. troops who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, specific domestic proposals often prompted the Democratic side to jump to their feet and the Republican side to sit on their hands.

Obama signaled little of the move to the center, or the willingness to compromise, that is likely to be needed if deals are to be made over the next two years on the issues that divide them. He didn't project the air of a president whose sagging approval ratings helped cost his party dearly in the midterm elections just two months ago.

Obama: Don't let politics get in way of growing economy During President Obama's 2015 State of the Union Address, he described America's growing economy and rising wages, but said middle-class economic policies work as long as politics don't get in the way.

In the hours leading up to the speech, the White House issued two veto threats to bills the Republican-controlled Congress just might pass.

"When he came in, he had a filibuster-proof Senate and an overwhelming majority in the House, and now he's facing a Republican Congress and the largest House membership for Republicans since the '20s," said GOP pollster David Winston, an adviser to Republican congressional leaders. He said the GOP was watching to see whether Obama would "double-down" on policies they argue the electorate already has rejected.

They got their answer. Republicans applauded when Obama said, "I have no more campaigns to run." He shot back, in words not in his text, "I know because I won both of them."

Watch Obama's biggest zinger of the State of the Union During President Obama's 2015 State of the Union Address, he had one especially memorable moment when he mentioned that he had no more campaigns to run.

Afterwards, 2012 Republican challenger Mitt Romney dismissively posted on Twitter: "True to form, the President in his State of the Union speech is more interested in politics than in leadership."

Obama opened the speech telling the story of a young couple from Minneapolis, Rebekah and Ben Erler, who had come through the economy's hard times, and he mentioned them again at the close. He concluded with a passage urging "a better politics," returning to themes he had struck at the speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004 that launched him as a national political figure.

In between, this State of the Union had less of the feel of a laundry list of legislation -- perhaps realistically so, given the difficulties he'll have getting things through Congress -- and more of a thematic statement of what he sees as the nation's fundamental economic principles.

There seems to be a rhythm to two-term presidencies, and the sixth State of the Union typically falls during a time of trouble. Reagan was ensnared in the Iran-contra scandal. Bill Clinton was being impeached in the Monica Lewinsky affair. George W. Bush was rebuffing demands that he withdraw U.S. troops from an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

Obama is emerging from a year marked by one crisis after another, though mostly not of his own making: the Ebola epidemic in Africa, the rising threat of the Islamic State, the Ferguson shooting and protests that followed. Election losses in November cost his party control of the Senate, which meant that, like every other two-term president since World War II, at this point in his tenure, he was addressing a Congress controlled by the opposition.

In some ways, though, Obama has a stronger political standing than he's enjoyed in some time, in part because steady economic growth, a declining unemployment rate, a booming stock market and falling gas prices have persuaded even some skeptics that the trauma from the financial meltdown more than six years ago has eased. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday, 45% of Americans said they were satisfied with the state of the economy, the most in more than a decade.

"He may be in a situation where he has a more receptive national audience because things seem to be improving on his watch, and it's clear the public is giving him some credit for it," says Steven Schier, a political scientist at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.

The rising concern is that the benefits from that recovery disproportionately have rebounded to the rich. In good economic times since the Great Depression, wages generally have grown. Not this time: Most Americans' incomes have been stagnant for the past 15 years. Those in the middle have seen their wealth decline during Obama's presidency.

"I don't think anybody is going to be pretending that he's going to be able to issue a grand new proposal and expect it to be passed into law by this Congress," says Michael Waldman, the White House speechwriter who took the lead in drafting Clinton's sixth State of the Union and heads the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU Law School.

But he noted that Obama was able to make his case Tuesday night in a setting laced with history and ceremony, introduced with pomp into the chamber by the sergeant-at-arms, then speaking for more than an hour before lawmakers, his Cabinet, Supreme Court justices – and the public.