Bill Clinton might put it, Barack Obama has brass. Barely two months after his party suffered a shattering defeat in the midterm elections, Obama walked into the House chamber looking like a quarterback just returned home from a Super Bowl triumph. “Good to see you,” he said, joshing with Democrats who had arrived early to get an aisle seat. “How are you?” If he noticed some prominent absences on the Democratic side, including such stalwart supporters as Kay Hagan and Mark Udall, two senators who lost their seats in the fall, he didn’t let on. Entering enemy terrain, the President was clearly determined to make it his own—at least for one night.


Although Obama ended with one of his trademark calls for unity, the address he delivered was forceful and politically charged. As expected, the heart of it was a populist economics plan that challenges virtually everything today’s Republican Party stands for. “Middle-class economics,” the President called it, and without delving into too many details he made a pretty good fist of laying it out: tax breaks for working families, a higher minimum wage, expanded child care, two years’ worth of free community-college tuition guaranteed, investments in infrastructure—and much of this to be financed by raising taxes on the rich and the big banks. “Let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one per cent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth,” Obama declared. “We need a tax code that truly helps working Americans trying to get a leg up in the economy.”

That part of the speech, which echoed some of the themes that were raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and that have since been further elucidated by Thomas Piketty, was well trailed. What came as more of a surprise was the President’s over-all tone, which clearly reflected his recent successes in doing an end run around Congress on immigration policy, reaching a deal on climate change with China, reversing U.S. policy toward Cuba, and seeing his approval ratings rise on the back of good economic news. From the beginning, his language was much more celebratory than in his previous State of the Union speeches. “We are fifteen years into this new century,” he said. “It has been, and still is, a hard time for many. But tonight, we turn the page.” There followed a litany of indicators showing that things are going right in the Union: a growing economy, shrinking deficits, a falling unemployment rate, millions fewer people without health insurance, an end to the combat mission in Afghanistan. “America, for all that we have endured, for all the grit and hard work required to come back, for all the tasks that lie ahead, know this: the shadow of crisis has passed, and the State of the Union is strong,” he said.

The President wasn’t merely upbeat. He was self-assured, glib, and, at times, bordering on bumptious. “Well, we’ve been warned,” Karl Rove complained on Twitter. “POTUS will spend rest of year campaigning.” In the chamber, the Republicans, some of whom had perhaps been expecting a more humble Obama, sat mostly in silence. (As is usual on these occasions, John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, looked like he was suffering from chronic constipation.) At one point, after reciting another encouraging economic development, the President turned to the Republicans and said, “This is good news, people.” It wasn’t until near the end that he acknowledged the results of the elections—the elections he triumphed in, that is. “I have no more campaigns to run,” he said. And then, departing from his prepared remarks in response to some applause from Republicans, he smiled and added: “I know, because I won both of them.”

In a speech that lasted about an hour, Obama devoted barely ten minutes to foreign policy: here, too, his interpretation of recent events was highly positive. Without providing much evidence to support his assertion, he said, “In Iraq and Syria, American leadership—including our military power—is stopping ISIL’s advance.” He also asked his hosts to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force against the jihadists in Iraq and Syria, and, addressing the nuclear negotiations with Iran, promised to veto a sanctions bill if Congress passes one. Turning to Russia and Ukraine, he didn’t quite declare victory over Vladimir Putin, but he came pretty close, mocking those who suggested, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year, that Putin had outmaneuvered the West. “Today, it is America that stands strong and united with our allies, while Russia is isolated, with its economy in tatters,” Obama said. “That’s how America leads: not with bluster but with persistent, steady resolve.”

By then, he was rolling toward the finish. He welcomed home Alan Gross, the American who had been held prisoner in Havana until the recent détente; hailed efforts to fight Ebola in West Africa (in truth, he could have made more of the efficacy of the government’s response here at home); pledged, once again, to shut down Guantánamo; and slipped in a stretcher about how restrained the United States has been in its deployment of drones. After declaring climate change to be the biggest threat to future generations, he went into a closing spiel that drew on a familiar Obama trope, saying that there’s no such thing as a liberal America and a conservative America, or a white America and a black America—only a United States of America, in which both parties should come together and embrace a “better politics.”

I won’t dwell on that bit, partly because it’s so familiar, and partly because it didn’t fit in with the rest of the speech, which had contained but one crumb for his Republican opponents to chew on—a promise to complete some new free-trade deals. (This inspired a bout of shoe-gazing in the Democratic ranks.)

As the President is well aware, his ambition of transcending partisanship has been frustrated. In fact, he now seems quite comfortable with embracing partisanship and economic populism. Until the end of the speech, when Obama circa 2004 put in a cameo appearance, he had provided a welcome glance of the Obama whom many Democrats believed they had elected in 2008: progressive, impassioned, and persuasive. “Where was this economic Obama in 2009?” the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney asked on Twitter. That’s a question that historians will certainly ponder. Last night, though, the President showed up and staged a successful occupation of Capitol Hill.