File Photo: US President Barack Obama delivering the 2014 State of the Union address. (Associated Press)
President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that it was time for Americans to "turn the page" on years of economic troubles, terrorism and lengthy wars, using his sixth State of the Union speech to remind listeners that his presidency ushered in an era of smarter American leadership and a growing US economy.
President Obama was to speak to a Congress controlled by Republicans for the first time in his presidency. But the policies the President was to call for suggested that he had no plans to curtail his own agenda in favor of Republican priorities.
"It's now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next fifteen years, and for decades to come," Mr Obama said in excerpts released ahead of his State of the Union address.
The 2016 presidential election loomed over Mr Obama's next-to-last State of the Union address, a speech to Congress and a national television audience that will focus on his bid to use tax policy to ease the economic woes of beleaguered low income Americans and the country's shrinking middle class.
Faced for the first time with a Congress that is dominated in both houses by opposition Republicans, Mr Obama's speech will propose increased tax rates for wealthy Americans with much of the new revenue earmarked to low- and middle-income earners who have seen wages stagnant for years. While he is making a bold proposal, tax-averse Republicans are unlikely to act on the president's plan.
But Mr Obama will be using one of his biggest platforms, a speech that will be nationally televised to tens of millions of Americans today, to highlight the issue of growing economic inequality, a critical marker for the next presidential campaign.
"Will we accept an economy where only a few of us do spectacularly well?" Mr Obama asked in the excerpts of the speech released by the White House. "Or will we commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort?"
Answering his own question, Mr Obama said: "So the verdict is clear. Middle-class economics works. Expanding opportunity works. And these policies will continue to work, as long as politics don't get in the way."
The president came out of his party's bruising November election losses with a surprising burst of activity and a bump in approval ratings. He's already vowed to veto seven legislative measures that are coming out of the new Republican-controlled Congress -