Obama is forced to adjust State of the Union goals

President Obama's first State of the Union address Wednesday night, to a nation increasingly concerned about his priorities and a Congress increasingly looking toward the midterm elections, will not be the speech the president and his team once envisioned him delivering.

The White House had once hoped this speech would give the president a chance to celebrate the successful passage of healthcare legislation that had become his top legislative priority. Instead, the speech gives him a chance to try to bounce back from his party's loss of a Senate race in Massachusetts that cost Democrats their key 60th vote and has brought the healthcare push to a halt.

Obama is expected to use the address to promise a renewed focus on fixing the economy and a new-found emphasis on fighting deficit spending.

The stakes are enormous for Obama's legislative agenda, his standing with the public and his party's ability to retain its congressional majorities in November.

"The speech is a way for him to address any perceived differences between his priorities and the public's priorities," said Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center. The most recent surveys by Pew and other pollsters show that the president retains the high regard of the public for personal attributes but is lagging on job approval.

One key reason for the disconnent, Dimock said, is jobs. "The fact that health care has dominated Congress' agenda and to some extent the president's, there is some public frustration over that."

This speech is Obama's best opportunity to deal with what he has acknowledged is "frustration and anger." And the White House seems eager to take advantage of that opportunity.

"The key in this speech, what he'll discuss more than anything, is getting our economy moving again," said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, promising that the president will be "feisty" at times and will indicate "that Washington has to be pushed" to make progress on health care and cutting spending. He said the president will also talk about counterterrorism and "the continued steps that we have to take ... to continue to keep our country safe."

But White House aides bristle at the notion that the speech is a chance to hit "reset" after a troubled first year in office. Gibbs insists "you'll find a remarkable amount of similarity" between what Obama is doing Wednesday and what he promised in the campaign and in 2009.

Stephen Hess, an aide to two presidents and a longtime analyst at the Brookings Institution, said his experience writing two State of the Union addresses persuades him that the White House could not have made major changes to this speech just because of the Massachusetts setback.

"It is very hard to turn this thing around on a dime just because he had a bad week," he said. "The rhetoric may be tinkered with and he may use the phrase 'I'm fighting for you' 27 more times. But the program can't change that much from what he was planning."

Politically, Democrats are pulling for Obama to shake them out of their post-Massachusetts depression. "There is a certain level of panic and despondency on the Hill among Democrats," said a veteran party strategist who spoke on background because he works on so many House campaigns. "That panic can lead to paralysis. And paralysis is not good for Democrats on the Hill and is not good for the president."

The strategist added that it was "enormously important for him to be able to rally those folks and at least be perceived as rallying the country in a particular direction. Because otherwise it is going to be very hard for him to get anything done with this Congress in the next year."

Congressional Republicans, who sense victories in November, are not about to help the president out of his dilemma, though they are likely to avoid any outbursts that would recall Obama's last major speech to Congress, when Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., shouted "You lie."

Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., said Republicans are particularly skeptical of the president's claims that he is cutting deficit spending. "I doubt if anybody is going to yell out, 'You lie,'" said Gingrey. "But it might be appropriate to stand up and say, 'The hypocrisy of all of this,'" he said.

Senate Republican Conference Chairman Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said Republicans are ready to give Obama credit for his decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan. But he sees little support on domestic issues.

"Years ago, I learned that a governor who throws himself into a single issue with everything he's got for as long as it takes usually can wear out everybody else," he told reporters on Tuesday, citing his own experience. He said the lesson applies to presidents as well, offering President Eisenhower's work in Korea at the beginning of his presidency as evidence.

"President Obama should focus with Eisenhower-like intensity on jobs," he said.

Erin McPike contributed to this report.