State of the Union: Obama sounds opening salvo of 2016 presidential race

President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night found him both confident amid a wave of good economic news and defiant of the GOP-controlled Congress, as he rolled out a series of progressive proposals around taxes, education and workplace protections that, nonetheless, have little chance of being enacted into law.

Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, have said the proposals are essentially dead-on-arrival in both chambers.

“The State of the Union is a chance to start anew, but all the president offered tonight is more taxes, more government, and more of the same approach that has failed middle-class families,” Boehner said in a statement after the speech. “These aren’t just the wrong policies, they’re the wrong priorities: growing Washington’s bureaucracy instead of America’s economy.” 

But Obama’s approach is more focused on defining the agenda for his party in the 2016 presidential campaign than actually looking to Congress for legislative accomplishments in the final two years of his presidency.

Obama could have chosen to extend an olive branch to Republicans in the hopes for a fruitful 114^th Congress, but instead opted for a more ideological, partisan speech that had the president in “campaign mode,” according to Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution and a former policy advisor to President Bill Clinton.

“It seemed to me he leaned significantly farther in the direction of 2016 and away from 2015 than I had expected,” said Galston.

Indeed, Obama’s address had the air of a stump speech, staking out free community college, paid leave for workers, a higher minimum wage and tax cuts for the middle class — in line with Democratic values more than achievable agenda items.

Elaine Karmack, governance studies fellow at Brookings, said that Obama was essentially waving a white flag on scoring any major legislative victories in the next two years and instead looked to bolster his successor.

“There’s two ways to build a presidential legacy, and it seems to me like last night Obama made a clear choice,” said Karmack. “One way is to actually try to accomplish things while you’re in office…and I think a lot of that speech indicated that he’d given up on that one. The second one is to, in fact, set up to have your party win your third term.”

“He was focusing on the middle class and he was running through the kind of positive statistics that Bill Clinton did all the time, to say basically, ‘I am producing for you,’” added Karmack.

Some analysts noted the speech seemed to be a validation of the resurgent liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

“It’s very much an Elizabeth Warren speech,” Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham University law professor and former candidate for New York governor said on Bloomberg News, noting that the president appeared to be co-opting the Massachusetts Senator’s language in talking about the disadvantaged. “You could feel the power I think of her populism in his overall framework and even in his language, and I think that’s very exciting. I think a lot of people are hungry for that.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has also toyed with the idea of running for the Democratic nomination and identifies as a socialist, also endorsed the president’s message.

“I support many of the initiatives the president outlined,” Sanders said in a statement. “I agree with the president that we should invest in our crumbling infrastructure, raise the minimum wage, establish pay equity for women workers and end the absurdity of millions of Americans working 50- to 60-hours-a-week without any overtime pay.”

Other commentators, however, noted that Obama’s positioning might pose problems for likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who has been more reticent to take up the progressive mantle throughout her lengthy political career.  

“Every time the president advances a concept that thrills his party’s liberal base, he creates a dilemma for Hillary Clinton,” commentator David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, wrote on The Atlantic.com. “Does she agree or not? Any time she is obliged to answer, her scope to define herself is constricted.” 

Republican presidential hopefuls, too, found themselves having to rebut the president and present alternate visions for bolstering the middle class, combating income inequality and reversing the tide of wage stagnation — all major themes of Obama’s speech.

“Income inequality has worsened under this Administration, and tonight President Obama offers more of the same policies — policies that have allowed the poor to get poorer, and the rich to get richer,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. in his videotaped State of the Union response. “Pitting one American against another is not a pathway towards prosperity. The President is intent on redistributing the pie but not growing it. He misunderstands that the bulk of America wants a bigger pie. They want to work and don’t want a handout — but a hand up.”