And Now, the Cheerleader in Chief

WASHINGTON — Hours before President Obama delivered his State of the Union address, a senior adviser to the president confided that his tone would be “self-consciously optimistic.” And so it was.

Gone was the president who told the nation in his inaugural speech that it was “time to set aside childish things,” and who spent much of his first two years bemoaning the mess his predecessor had left. In his place was an upbeat and forward-looking Mr. Obama, serving up rosy economic news (“The stock market has come roaring back”) and lauding America’s greatness and can-do spirit. (“We do big things.”)

It was perhaps no accident that Mr. Obama took Lou Cannon’s biography of that other optimist and purveyor of American exceptionalism, Ronald Reagan, with him to Hawaii over Christmas. Or that one of the Washington wise men the president consulted recently was Kenneth M. Duberstein, a chief of staff to President Reagan.

“Optimism,” Mr. Duberstein said in an interview, “is a force multiplier.”

One axiom of politics is that the optimistic candidate wins, as Jimmy Carter discovered after his so-called “malaise” speech (he never actually used the word) during the 1979 energy crisis. He lost to Mr. Reagan a year later. And people forget that Mr. Carter, the peanut-farming Georgia governor with the toothy grin, seemed the sunnier candidate in his 1976 campaign against Gerald Ford, who used his 1975 State of the Union address to inform Americans that “the state of the union is not good.”

Still, happy talk can take a political leader only so far, and there are hazards in Mr. Obama’s sudden surge of rhetorical sunshine, especially when nearly 1 in 10 Americans is out of work, the federal deficit exceeds $1 trillion and Mr. Obama’s prescription — targeted “investment” in areas like education, clean energy and high-speed rail — requires spending of the sort that makes many Americans deeply uneasy.

“The risk is that people think you don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mr. Cannon, the Reagan biographer. “Reagan thought that the bills they passed in 1981, the budget bill and the tax reduction bill, were going to bring in pretty quick prosperity, and then instead we went into a recession. That’s why his ratings went down. There were a lot of Americans who thought he was talking through his hat.”

Many a politician has suffered when optimism collides with reality. In 2006, as Americans watched the bloodshed escalate in Iraq, George W. Bush insisted that the country had not descended into civil war; his party lost Congress that year. And Democrats felt the wrath of voters last fall after the “recovery summer” Mr. Obama promised did not pan out.

All presidents are cheerleaders in a sense; keeping Americans’ spirits high is part of the job description. As David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, said, “I don’t think the American people are looking for the president to curl up in the fetal position and curse the darkness.”

The trick is for presidents to balance optimism with realism — “to convey optimism without illusions,” in the words of Michael Waldman, who was chief speechwriter in the Clinton White House. There was considerable debate last week about whether Mr. Obama had struck the correct balance. (Mr. Axelrod, for the record, believes he did.)

“The problem with this speech is he’s talking so much about winning the future that he’s in danger of losing the present,” said Richard Norton Smith, the presidential historian, who counts himself an Obama admirer. “I could imagine millions of people out there watching that speech, thinking to themselves, ‘Well, these are good ideas, but how is that going to get me a job?’ ”

Some Republicans accused Mr. Obama of ignoring the facts. Peter Wehner, who advised Mr. Bush and is now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center here, wrote that the president “spoke as if he were living in an alternate universe — one where a $14 trillion debt and trillion dollar-a-year deficit don’t exist.” Mr. Obama, he said, “is misreading the public mood.”

Perhaps, but polls show the mood improving. Two years ago, 7 percent of Americans thought the economy was getting better, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll. As of this month, that figure is 30 percent — not a knock-your-socks-off statistic, but one that provides a defensible foundation for lines like, “We are poised for progress.”

Politically, such rhetoric is perfectly timed. Mr. Obama is setting up his re-election campaign, and after two years stuck in legislative battles, he needs a positive vision to mobilize voters. His paean to American greatness (“not just a place on a map, but a light to the world”) was part of that, and he responded forcefully to Republicans like Sarah Palin, who accuse the president of not embracing American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is unique and superior to other nations.

“Part of it is clearly political,” said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University historian, adding: “In many ways the first two years he was like Carter — he was just dealing with one crisis after another, and he sounded that way. And now I think he’s trying to shift and sound more like Reagan.”

Mr. Axelrod hears neither Mr. Carter, nor Mr. Reagan, nor any president other than Mr. Obama. He draws a straight rhetorical line to the State of the Union address from earlier speeches like the heavily biographical 2004 keynote to the Democratic National Convention, in which Mr. Obama spoke of America as “a magical place.”

The State of the Union address, Mr. Axelrod said, was not so much a shift but a “matter of returning to first principles” for a president who had to temper his rhetoric when his administration was “functioning as a triage unit arriving in the middle of an economic calamity.”

Now that Mr. Obama has emerged from triage, his challenge is to convince the country that he can turn his rosy vision into reality. Implicit in his speech was a promise: If you agree with my ideas, this is the kind of country you can have. But Republicans in Congress already say they won’t approve any more spending, which could result in gridlock on Capitol Hill. And if the fragile recovery teeters or slips, Mr. Obama could wind up looking like he tried to sell the nation a bill of goods.

Going forward, the president must also convince voters of something else: that he believes his own words. Mr. Reagan oozed an infectious optimism; he liked to tell the story of the boy who got a pile of manure for Christmas and declared, “There must be a pony in here somewhere.” Mr. Obama is more cautious, more cerebral by nature — “a little more head, a little less heart,” as Mr. Cannon said.

Mr. Smith, the historian, said that what made Mr. Reagan so extraordinary was not that he told Americans “we were made for great things,” but that “he made us believe it.” Mr. Duberstein, the former Reagan chief of staff, drew on an old Reaganism to sum up Mr. Obama’s situation.

“This,” he said, “is a trust-but-verify moment.”