The contrast couldn’t have been greater. And it’s one Americans will see over and over throughout 2016.
For months, Republican presidential candidates have used their debates and their many other platforms to portray the United States as facing disaster at home and abroad, blaming President Barack Obama’s policies. The state of the union, GOP front-runner Donald Trump said, is “a mess.”
On Tuesday night, Obama took what might be his last major opportunity to counter that picture by presenting Congress and the nation an accounting of the progress since he inherited the worst domestic economy since the Great Depression some 75 years earlier.
“The state of our union is strong,” Obama said, declaring that “anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.” And he hailed a record including “the longest streak of private-sector job creation in history,” the auto industry’s “best year ever” and the access of 17 million more Americans to health care.
The president’s final State of the Union speech summed up an impressive record of domestic accomplishment. But it also provided the basis for Democrat candidates to challenge the GOP’s exaggerated claims of national decline.
Obama listed specific issues like gun control, criminal justice reform and trade where he hopes for progress before leaving office. But he also addressed the bitter partisanship of recent years, urging bipartisan efforts to “fix our politics” and declaring “one of the few regrets of my presidency (is) that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse, instead of better.”
In doing so, however, he failed to acknowledge how much his sharp attacks on GOP critics has angered Republicans, and did not hesitate to take some not-so-veiled shots at several Republicans hoping to succeed him.
By devoting three-fourths of Tuesday’s speech to domestic affairs, Obama acknowledged that his role in history, beyond his election as the country’s first president of color, hinges on the long-term impact of a domestic record that journalist Michael Grunwald wrote recently in Politico “has produced much more sweeping change than most of his supporters or detractors realize.”
In fact, even some Republicans acknowledge the impact of the array of health, education, energy and financial measures enacted under Obama. Former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called him, along with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, “one of the three most transformative presidents in the past century.”
But supporters and critics disagree on whether that transformation has been beneficial. That debate, like Obama’s speech, will define the 2016 campaign.