Job Growth

The president can point to the surprisingly strong December employment report released on Jan. 8, which underscored the economy’s progress and took total job gains for the year to 2.65 million, following a 3.1 million rise in 2014. That was the best back-to-back yearly increase since 1998-1999. Employers were cutting jobs at a rate of almost 800,000 a month when Obama took office at the depths of the worst downturn since the 1930s.

The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has more than doubled since Obama took office. And one of the post-speech trips Obama plans will be to Detroit, home of the U.S. auto industry, which in 2015 set a sales record of 17.5 million cars and light trucks. The administration pointed to those figures as vindication of a taxpayer-funded bailout of the three big U.S. automakers amid an industry collapse.

Obama also plans to visit Omaha, Nebraska, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to talk about the falling jobless rate and education. And Cabinet members will fan out across the country in the days following the speech for events focused on subjects ranging from health and safety to climate change.

Global Turmoil

Even so, the address comes at a time of turmoil in global financial markets driven by concern over China’s slowing growth, and renewed fears of terrorism among Americans following attacks by Islamic State-inspired Muslim extremists. A provocative nuclear test by North Korea just last week further unsettled the world.

Slow wage growth, particularly among workers without college degrees, is also fueling middle-class discontent and a populist wave propelling Trump and other anti-establishment candidates.

Obama’s record will set the political atmosphere for the presidential campaign. Whether or not Democrat Hillary Clinton fully embraces the Obama agenda, Republicans already foreshadow their general election strategy by tying her tightly to his administration.

Reagan’s Legacy

As far back as the Democratic primary campaign in 2008, Obama expressed admiration for Republican Ronald Reagan’s achievement of a presidency marking a transformation in American politics that continued long after he left the White House.

Like Reagan, whose election heralded a movement of working- class white “Reagan Democrats” to the Republican Party and a long-term shift of the once solidly Democratic South, Obama’s two terms mark a political shift of potentially lasting consequence. The nation’s demography is changing as blacks, Hispanics and Asians grow as a share of the population and the electorate.

Reagan used his final State of the Union address, in 1988, as one of many occasions to connect his political principles to those of the nation’s founders and to Abraham Lincoln, and to define his record in office: “Our record is not just the longest peacetime expansion in history, but an economic and social revolution of hope based on work, incentives, growth and opportunity,” Reagan said.

The strength of any president’s political legacy is inevitably tied to popular perceptions of how the country fared during his time in office, and above all the performance of the economy, whether or not there is a clear connection with his policies, said H.W. Brands, a presidential historian and biographer of Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt.