Barack Obama - 'Non-traditional' State of the Union address will focus on America's future

Alan Yuhas

Barack Obama will not deliver ‘your traditional policy speech that outlines a series of proposals’ but will touch on inequality, criminal justice and gun violence.

 Barack Obama will deliver a sweeping and “non-traditional” State of the Union address that touches on inequality, criminal justice and gun violence, the White House chief of staff said on Sunday.

“He doesn’t want this to be your traditional policy speech that outlines a series of proposals,” Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, told ABC’s This Week, during a tour of the talkshows to preview the president’s final such speech, which he will deliver on Tuesday in Washington.

Instead, McDonough said, Obama plans to “step back and take a look at the future of this country” and “talk about the kind of country he hopes will be present not just in the course of this year, and this election year, but over the course of the next 20 years”.

McDonough said major themes of the speech will include how inequality affects democracy, and Obama’s aim to create an “economy that gives everyone a fair shot”. He added that the president will stress that “every American has a chance to influence this democracy, not the select few” whom he said included “millionaires, billionaires”.

“America succeeds when we draw on all 350 million Americans that we have in this country,” he said.

Obama will not endorse a candidate before the 2016 Democratic primary election, McDonough told NBC’s Meet the Press. The president plans instead to campaign “out there” after the election, in favor of the chosen nominee.

McDonough insisted that the president will return to the rhetoric of hope and optimism that vaulted him to the White House in 2008.

“He’s very optimistic about the future,” he told CNN’s State of the Union – the first of five shows on which he appeared.

The speech will be “very different than some of the doom and gloom we hear from some of the Republican candidates out there”, he told ABC.

Pressed on what Obama hopes to achieve in his final year in office, with Congress held by the Republicans, McDonough said the president will push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal and criminal justice reform, two issues many Republicans support.

The White House also announced the guest list of men and women who will sit with the first lady, Michelle Obama, during the address – an eclectic mix that hints at the president’s priorities for his last year in office.

The list includes Refaii Hamo, a Syrian refugee who arrived in Detroit in December, and Saudi-American army veteran Naveed Shah, reflections of the president’s effort to resettle 10,000 refugees and his opposition to anti-Muslim sentiment.

The president may also speak on his growing concern for mounting heroin and prescription pill abuse, something McDonough noted in remarks about therecapture of a Mexican cartel boss, and an issue highlighted by guest Cary Dixon, an opioid reform advocate.

One seat in the first lady’s guest box will stay empty, the White House said, in memory of victims of gun violence “who no longer have a voice”. In the wake of mass shootings in California, Oregon and South Carolina and persistent gun violence in Chicago and other cities, gun control has become one of the president’s most emotional – and difficult – objectives.

“In Dr King’s words, we need to feel the fierce urgency of now, because people are dying,” Obama told an audience last week, breaking down into tears as he spoke.

He reminded the audience of the 20 children murdered by a gunman in Sandy Hook, Connecticut in 2012. “Every time I think about those kids, it gets me mad and, by the way, it happens on the streets of Chicago every day.”

“The president is not making a big issue of gun control,” McDonough told CNN. “What’s happening in our country, with more than 33,000 deaths” by mass shooting a year, he said, means “this is a big issue”. 

McDonough also suggested that Obama means to reflect on how his two terms fit in the scope of US history, past and future.

Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff who brought same-sex marriage to the US supreme court and won its legalization last year, will sit in the guest box, as will Major Lisa Jaster, one of the first women to graduate from the army’s elite ranger school.

Gloria Balenski, an Illinois woman who lost her job in the 2008 financial crisis, will also join as a guest, having written Obama a letter thanking him for prioritizing the economy and healthcare in his first term.

The presence of Balenski, two Vietnam war veterans and a native Alaskan who now works as a software engineer – along with the White House’s pointed use of the phrase “great recession”– suggests a speech that will implicitly frame Obama with other reformer presidents, such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.