Ron Fournier: Obama’s State of the Union All About Preserving His Legacy

“He [Obama] will be able to do a little bit on his own like executive action and have federal employees get more benefits. But he’s going to be able to do very little with the Republicans. But this is more about his legacy. His numbers are coming up, he wants to keep bringing them up. He’s also trying to change the bully pulpit in an interesting way. This is not going to be a State of the Union like we saw with Bill Clinton and a little less so with George Bush, where it was basically a laundry list of things we hadn’t heard of. He’s rolling them out beforehand, and I think he’s going to try to use the State of Union more of framing and context and forward-looking vision about his party and his legacy.”