Amid a raucous presidential campaign and online distractions, the president and his team are working on creative ways to break through the cacophony.

By SARAH WHEATON, politico

As President Barack Obama worked on his seventh and final State of the Union address, his team spent much of the last week struggling to make sure Americans will actually get the message.

Obama faces stiff competition for the nation’s attention. The rollicking, Trump-dominated presidential campaign has swamped airwaves and social media. That’s one reason Obama scheduled the State of the Union a week earlier than usual, to get ahead of the Republican and Democratic debates scheduled for later this week and to put some distance between his speech and the first contest of the presidential campaign season — the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses.

With no new policies or initiatives to announce, Obama’s effort to break through is even tougher. He isn’t trying to win the night with his message, or even pick a new fight with Congress. The White House promises Obama also will not spend too much time looking back at the past seven years or issue a list of demands for the next one. Instead, he’ll deliver a soaring speech about the nation’s future and talk about, as White House press secretary Josh Earnest put it, how decisions made today will impact the “next generation of Americans.”

That thematic approach is “more farewell address than State of the Union address,” said Georgia State University presidential historian Daniel P. Franklin.

“Why spend time laying out a legislative agenda which is DOA? Why not start acting like somebody who is looking towards their legacy?” said Franklin, author of “Pitiful Giants: Presidents in Their Final Terms.”Even if the political cacophony weren’t so loud, drumming up attention for the president’s last State of the Union address would be tough. And with viewers increasingly focused on phones and tablets whether or not they watch the speech, aides are trying to come up with novel ways of using secondary media to deliver the message.

“Every State of the Union a president has under their belt makes it harder to drive interest in the speech,” said Brent Colburn, communications director for Obama’s reelection campaign. That “puts a premium on being more creative,” he said.

Even by the standards of this social media-savvy White House, aides are launching an unprecedented campaign for the attention of the next generation, the millennials. If they do it right, this generation could talk about Obama like boomers talk about Kennedy and Reagan.
They are hosting a “West Wing”-inspired online Q-and-A session with more than 50 administration officials called “#BigBlockofCheeseDay.’’ They’ll provide annotations of the speech on Genius, behind-the-scenes moments on SnapChat and Instagram, and on Friday, interviews of the president by YouTube stars Destin Sandlin, Ingrid Nilsen and sWooZie.

No matter what, White House officials say, the State of the Union is still a singular moment, and Obama is determined to capitalize.

“In an era where the political debate is chock full of arguments, having a moment where everybody focuses on what the president has to say is an important part of keeping the country together,” Earnest told reporters on Monday.

In particular, Obama intends to offer a rebuttal of the “downer” messages of the Republican field, arguing that America is great — again — after digging out of the worst recession in decades over the course of his seven years in office.

The president will acknowledge, Earnest said, “justified concerns about the impact of the global economy on middle-class families here in the United States,” as well as the threat from ISIL. But ultimately, Earnest said, Obama “has never been more confident” in Americans’ ability to “overcome those challenges and, just as importantly, to capitalize on the opportunities that exist.”

Obama still has things he wants to get done as president. He’ll push Congress to move forward with a bipartisan deal on criminal justice reform and ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He’ll make a point about gun violence with an empty seat in the first lady’s box, and another about tolerance by introducing Refaai Hamo, a Syrian refugee. Other guests will help Obama highlight issues like opioid addiction, veterans’ homelessness, health reform, tech innovation, immigration and gay marriage. The president’s drive to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay with the help of Congress is still “as strong as ever,” Earnest said.

The people around Obama say he’s not giving up on any of it — even if the calendar is an undeniable reality.

“The president needs to do two things in this speech: First, he needs to communicate his sense of urgency around the things he wants to get done this year. And second, he needs set the table for a successor and a Congress that will continue the work he is unable to complete,” Colburn said. “It’s the crux of the next 12 months for the White House — how do you push the boulder as far uphill as possible, and what can you do to make sure it doesn’t roll back downhill once you are gone?”

How starkly a president’s successor can change the course of the nation is clear from President George W. Bush’s seventh State of the Union address. It was 2008, and as he noted, the housing market was in decline. But Bush also touted the successful troop surge in Iraq, and those soldiers were just beginning to come home, he said, as he urged against a too-hasty drawdown.

Obama can rightfully boast that the economic crisis that followed has eased throughout his two terms. But now he faces pressure to send more troops to the Middle East to deal with the rise of the Islamic State, and he was not able to end the war in Afghanistan amid rising violence there.
Obama won’t have the airwaves and social media to himself, of course. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is slated to deliver the Republicans’ response, and Donald Trump and other presidential candidates will likely offer their own set of retorts in real time, including via Twitter. Just two days later, on Thursday, the Republicans will debate who can best unravel Obama’s legacy. On Sunday, Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders will spar over who should replace Obama as the Democrats’ standard-bearer.

But on Tuesday night, Obama will be looking past all that, Earnest said.
“Frankly, the stakes are higher than any one president and any one Congress,” he said.