The state of the union is “strong,” President Obama declared last night, and so, it turns out, was the State of the Union address. Tuesday’s speech looked hale and fit, weighing in at around sixty-five hundred words and almost exactly sixty minutes and lifting members of Congress out of their seats like a speech half its age (two hundred and twenty-five years). This might come as a surprise; just last week, Politico accused the President of “killing” the speech by rolling out pieces of it in the days and weeks beforehand. Obama’s “SOTU Spoilers,” as the White House insisted on calling them, were said, by other commentators, to have “robbed the event of suspense.” (The White House delivered the ultimate spoiler when, minutes before the speech, it released the full text on the Web site Medium.)

Never mind that the State of the Union usually has all the drama of the Queen’s annual Christmas message. Arguably, the spoilers—which included steps to normalize relations with Cuba and a proposal to finance middle-class tax cuts by raising capital-gains and inheritance taxes—kept President Obama and the speech at center stage over the past month, displacing the new Republican Congress. Of course, the Nielsen ratings, which will be released today, might show a further decline in viewership of the State of the Union; last year’s audience of 33.3 million was less than two-thirds that of Obama’s first address to Congress, in 2009. If so, it isn’t Obama’s fault so much as your own. The narrowing of the national attention span has not been kind to long speeches. Besides, the only proven way to gin up interest in the State of the Union is to gin up a preëmptive war in the Middle East, which is the approach that George W. Bush took in 2003. That year’s speech, which preceded the invasion of Iraq by several weeks, attracted sixty-two million viewers, the largest audience since 1993. Mission accomplished!

Since most of President Obama’s initiatives were already familiar, the most notable aspect of Tuesday’s address was his tone: upbeat, unapologetic. Obama did not sound like a man whose party had just lost the Senate. (Senator Harry Reid, however, looked like that man.) Nor did he appear at all prepared to accept the limits that Republicans want to place on his Presidency. Last night, Obama had the punchy, self-assured air of a President on a roll, freed of old encumbrances (a narrow, nervous Democratic majority in the Senate) and buoyed by both a big jump in his approval ratings and, most important, a growing economy. “We have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth,” he said.

In recent months, as job creation has heated up, some Democrats have warned the President against this kind of ebullience. “People are in trouble,” the political strategist Stan Greenberg told the Times, after reportedly saying the same thing to David Simas, the White House political director. Indeed, many are, as Obama acknowledged last night. “Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?” he asked. His legislative agenda—for example, his sixty-billion-dollar plan to make community college free for most students—shows his refusal to accept that reality, and aims squarely at the problem of income inequality. At the same time, Obama was unrestrained in his discussion of America’s economic progress—and the role that he has played in it. “At every step, we were told our goals were misguided or too ambitious, that we would crush jobs and explode deficits,” the President said. “Instead, we’ve seen the fastest economic growth in over a decade, our deficits cut by two-thirds, a stock market that has doubled, and health-care inflation at its lowest rate in fifty years.” Here he paused, savored these statistics, then ad-libbed: “This is good news, people.” A wink, a smile, a sideways glance. This is a man who is pleased with himself.

For Obama, this constitutes a meaningful shift. Long constrained by his own overcautiousness, he has, for several months now, been parting by degrees with his reluctance to talk about economic growth and job gains. As recently as April, in a speech about the minimum wage, he offered no indication that the economy was improving, except to say—a bit accusingly—that “those at the top are doing better than ever.” By summer, as the midterm elections approached, he had warmed to saying that, “by almost every measure, we are better off now than we were when I took office.” Last night’s address featured his most full-throated expression of satisfaction about the recovery yet. He has, in his phrase of choice, “turned the page.”

The reason this matters is that it’s not, in the end, only about taking credit; it’s about credibility. President Obama won’t have much of the latter unless he claims more of the former. By reminding Americans how far the nation has come since the financial crisis of 2008, and what it took to get here, Obama can create at least a little more public confidence in his plans for the rest of his time in office. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’ll have much success getting his agenda through Congress. But, if he sticks to his own story, and tells it repeatedly, he might have at least a fighting chance of winning an argument with the G.O.P. over, say, what elements to include in a tax-reform deal, or which party can, in 2016, be trusted with the hopes of middle-class Americans. Stay tuned for more good news, people.