Obama Pursuing a Modest Agenda in State of Union

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WASHINGTON — His ambitions in check and his eye on the calendar, President Obama intends to use his State of the Union address to put a difficult year behind him and reassert command before the capital is consumed with election-year politics.

After five years in office, Mr. Obama has, by his own account, come to feel acutely the limits on his power and the shrinking horizons before him — all of which make his nationally televised speech to Congress on Tuesday a critical opportunity to drive an agenda that may yet shape his legacy.

But perhaps more so than in any of his previous congressional addresses, Mr. Obama realizes that he has little chance of major legislative victories this year, with the possible exception of an overhaul of immigration law that Republicans are also making a priority. As a result, aides said, he will present a blueprint for “a year of action” on issues like income inequality and the environment that bypasses Congress and exercises his authority to the maximum extent.

“This presidency is not going to be defined from here forward by big legislative initiatives,” said Jeff Shesol, a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who was consulted by this White House. “Given that, he’s got to convey a sense of focus and forward momentum. He’s got a lot of time left in this presidency, and I think people will want to get the sense that he knows how to operate in this environment and that there is a strategy.”

After failing to push through gun control legislation and other priorities he raised in last year’s State of the Union address, Mr. Obama must take a different approach this year, aides and analysts said.

“Pushing for a series of new initiatives when last year’s initiatives still need to get done is a challenge,” said Neera Tanden, president of the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “At the same time, he probably shouldn’t be limited to what the House of Representatives could pass, because that would be an incredibly limited vision.”

Mr. Obama will still use the speech to push for an immigration overhaul, with aides guardedly optimistic that he may reach a compromise with Republicans. He will also call for a higher minimum wage, more infrastructure spending and an expansion of prekindergarten education, issues on which the parties are less likely to agree.

White House officials said Mr. Obama would use the speech to announce executive actions he can take without congressional approval to expand economic opportunity for middle-class workers in areas like retirement security and job training. The officials expressed hope that these actions would prod Congress to take further steps.

In an email to supporters on Saturday, the president’s senior adviser, Dan Pfeiffer, characterized Mr. Obama’s coming message as “opportunity, action and optimism” and promised “a set of real, concrete, practical proposals” to strengthen the economy and expand opportunity.

But Mr. Pfeiffer acknowledged the limits. “The president will seek out as many opportunities as possible to work with Congress in a bipartisan way,” he wrote. “But when American jobs and livelihoods depend on getting something done, he will not wait for Congress.”

To counter Mr. Obama’s increased focus on economic disparities, Republicans are trying to turn the issue around on him, arguing that his own policies on jobs, deficit spending, regulations and health care have exacerbated income inequality.

“The president has a lot of explaining to do,” Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri said on Saturday in a Republican radio and Internet address. “If all he has to offer is more of the same, or if he refuses to acknowledge that his own policies have failed to work, the president is simply doing what many failed leaders have done before him: trying to set one group of Americans against another group of Americans.”

Mr. Obama’s sense of possibility has contracted. A year after an intoxicating re-election victory, when he had a 57 percent approval rating, his support has fallen to 42 percent. Within months, lawmakers will be absorbed by their own campaigns in the midterm elections, and after that, Washington will begin to turn its focus to the contest to succeed Mr. Obama.

So these days, Mr. Obama envisions a more modest place in the tide of history. “At the end of the day, we’re part of a long-running story,” he told David Remnick of The New Yorker. “We just try to get our paragraph right.”

Mr. Obama said that while he might not accomplish his goals during his tenure, he hoped to plant seeds. “The things you start may not come to full fruition on your timetable,” he told Mr. Remnick. “But you can move things forward. And sometimes the things that start small may turn out to be fairly significant.”

The seemingly diminished expectations expressed in those comments surprised many in Washington, where presidents rarely acknowledge limits. Concerned about the impression Mr. Obama had left, aides warned against overanalyzing his words and said he was reinvigorated after the setbacks of 2013.

“He’s very focused and very excited about all the ways we can move the ball forward if Congress isn’t willing to go along, accepting of the reality that no Congress of the other party tends to green-light the agenda of the president of the opposite party,” Mr. Pfeiffer said in an interview. “He’s energized by the creative thinking going into the ways to move forward.”

Mr. Obama is hardly the first president to recognize the disparity between the perception and the reality of his power. In his last year in office, George W. Bush was asked by an aide what had surprised him about being president. “How little authority I have,” he answered.

But that does not mean a president is without options if Congress is against him. Mr. Obama recently turned to John D. Podesta, Mr. Clinton’s former chief of staff, to test the boundaries of executive authority, using what Mr. Pfeiffer calls the power of his pen and phone.

“I’m sure in his speech he won’t bemoan any lack of presidential authority,” said John P. McConnell, a former speechwriter for Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. “It’ll be the exact opposite.”

Before the holidays, Mr. Obama’s staff asked Mr. Shesol and other veterans of the Clinton and Bush administrations for ideas on governing without support from Congress. On the day he left for vacation in Hawaii last month, Mr. Obama had a long conversation with aides about the State of the Union address, then met with them again after returning.

While not minimizing last year’s troubles — the botched health care law rollout, the fitful handling of Syria, the failure to pass gun control laws — aides to Mr. Obama argued that they had cleared away the underbrush with the improvement of the federal health care website and with recent bipartisan spending deals.

“You can say: ‘There’s a little hope, we had a tough year, and there’s an election ahead. We can either yell at each other all year and not accomplish anything, or we can surpass the expectations people have and actually get something done,’ ” said Jon Favreau, who was Mr. Obama’s chief speechwriter until last year.

Even if Mr. Obama does not persuade lawmakers, he has a chance to frame the national conversation, an effort he will continue with a two-day trip to Maryland, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Tennessee. While interest in the State of the Union address has fallen — the television ratings last year were the second lowest in 20 years — it is still an opportunity to reach more than 30 million Americans unfiltered.

“For that one night, he’ll have the spotlight the way no other person in the country will have all year,” said Robert Schlesinger, author of “White House Ghosts,” a history of presidential speechwriters. “As limited as the powers of the bully pulpit are, especially in the communications age, that still ain’t nothing.”