POLITICS | NEWS ANALYSIS

A Nation’s Political Split Screen

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Mitch McConnell, second from left, and Senate colleagues chatting before the State of the Union.Doug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Over the course of 48 hours, Americans will confront two starkly disparate views of Barack Obama’s America that will frame the debate over the future of the country in this election year and beyond.
The nation described by the president on Tuesday night in his final State of the Union address is a global power on the rise again, with more jobs, better health care and stunning innovation. Though grappling with serious challenges, it is poised for greater progress.
The country that Republican presidential candidates will depict on Thursday night in their next debate is a darker place, a once-great power that has lost ground in a dangerous world, surrendered its authority and leadership and diminished freedom and opportunity at home.
Whichever view ultimately seems more credible to the public will help determine who succeeds Mr. Obama next January and sets the nation’s course for the following four years. For months, Republicans led by Donald J. Trump have tapped into a deep river of discontent in the electorate, and Mr. Obama decided to use the most prominent platform in American politics to push back.
“Tonight was President Obama’s morning-in-America response to the malaise speech that the Republican candidates have been delivering for the last year,” said Jon Favreau, the president’s former chief speechwriter. “From Reagan to Clinton and Obama, people have never elected a pessimistic president who talks about America like it’s a Mad Max movie.”
But Republicans said Mr. Obama would have a hard time convincing the public with a rosy picture that conflicts with their own perceptions and experiences. Iran’s detention of 10 American sailors from two Navy patrol boats in the Persian Gulf just hours before the president’s address provided timely ammunition for the Republican case that his diplomacy with Tehran has failed while America’s power has weakened.
“Americans wake up every day to more bad news with a world in constant crisis,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a national security advocacy group. “American leadership is in decline while the world is in full meltdown with Iranian mullahs, Russian dictators and radical Islamists on the ascent. No State of the Union address, no matter how eloquent, can explain away that harsh reality.”
Republicans are not the only ones who see a glass half empty. Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who has mounted a populist challenge to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, has drawn huge crowds with his portrayal of a country dominated by well-heeled Wall Street plutocrats profiting off workers who have increasingly lost ground.
Such negativity from the right and left has exasperated Mr. Obama, who has gotten less credit than aides say he deserves for the progress of the last seven years. Aides said he wanted his final State of the Union address to not only point the way forward, but to refute the gloomy assessments Republicans routinely present.
“There is this doubling down on a dark vision of the state of the American economy and the state of America’s leadership in the world that he believes is just not true," said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser to Mr. Obama.
By some measures, Mr. Obama has a compelling case. Unemployment has fallen to 5 percent, less than half its peak during the financial crisis he inherited, and more than 13 million more jobs have been created since the recovery began. More than 17 million Americans have health care coverage under Mr. Obama’s program. Median household income finally reached $56,746 in November, the level when the recession began. Violent crime is down; so are gas prices.
“To Republicans who won’t give the president any credit for any success in 2016, I would just suggest they read the statistics about where we were at his first State of the Union address in 2009,” said Representative Steve Israel, a Democrat from New York. “But they can’t afford to do that and that is part of their political calculation. They are so petrified by the fear of a primary on the right.”
But two out of three Americans still feel the country is on the wrong path, in part because the gains of the last few years have not been distributed equally Income inequality has grown worse. The poverty rate remains at 14.8 percent, higher than when Mr. Obama took office. Although the budget deficit has been slashed from its recession spike, the overallnational debt has ballooned from $11 trillion to $18 trillion under Mr. Obama.
More challenging to the president’s argument may be foreign policy, where his successes have been overshadowed by turmoil from Paris to Ukraine to Libya to Syria.
Mr. Obama has in the last year secured a landmark nuclear agreement with Iran, reopened an embassy in Cuba, sealed a free-trade pact in the Asia-Pacific region and corralled the world into a climate change accord. But each of those agreements has its critics who worry about the economic or national security impact.
The resurgence of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, the devastating civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State, accompanied by terrorist attacks and beheadings, have unsettled many Americans. A president who authorized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and hoped to leave office having ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will instead hand his successor an unresolved war spreading across multiple countries.
“It’s increasingly clear the anxiety voters feel is not just economic,” said Sara Fagen, a Republican strategist. “They are concerned with what they perceive as a weakened America on the world stage. They believe that even if America was leading, the rest of the world would not follow us. Obama’s actions on Iran, Syria and Russia have done nothing to assuage that fear.”
One of the hardest things for a president to do is to assuage fear, and as the aftermath of the attack in San Bernardino, Calif., showed, Mr. Obama’s style tends toward the intellectual, and at times didactic, even as he is trying to be reassuring.
He took over in exceedingly hard times and has struggled ever since to inspire in office the way he did on the campaign trail. But as he begins his final stretch, he has a bully pulpit and he made clear Tuesday night that he intends to use it.
He has 373 days left to define what people think of Barack Obama’s America.