President Obama will deliver his last State of the Union address Tuesday at a moment when fear and anger seem to be driving both the American electorate and the candidates seeking to replace him in the White House.

His challenge? Communicate a message big enough to rise above the election-season vitriol.

To that end, the White House has promised a “non-traditional” speech that, in the president’s words, will cut through the “day-to-day noise of Washington” and celebrate the country’s capacity “to come together as one American family.” Instead of a to-do list of policy proposals that have little chance of passing Congress, he has said he plans to deliver a speech that will describe “who we are” as a nation — or perhaps more accurately, whom Obama, in the last year of his presidency, would like us to be.

The problem for the president in his seventh year in office is that the gulf between his vision of a unified America, one he has trumpeted from his earliest days on the national scene, and the political reality has never seemed wider. This final address from the House chamber represents one of his last, best chances to frame the November election.

On issues including guns, immigration reform and Middle Eastern refugees, Obama faces a deeply divided American public. Some of his signature political victories from 2015, such as the Iran nuclear deal and the opening to Cuba, have provoked a fierce Republican backlash.

The divide is perhaps deepest on issues of war and terrorism, which are likely to dominate Obama’s last year in office as well as the upcoming election.

“We all expected to be in a different place, and we’re not,” said Julianne Smith, a former Obama White House official and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Obama, his speechwriters and his national security team were still working on drafts of the speech last week and over the weekend, White House officials said.

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Source: Greg Jaffe and David Nakamura, https://www.washingtonpost.com