The theme of President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address Tuesday night was "winning the future." It also could have been labeled, "winning the center." 
 
 The speech was designed to show that Mr. Obama, just two months after suffering deep bruises in the midterm election, has a grasp of what a previous president called the vision thing. With its talk of investing in education, basic research and new technologies, the address marked a conscious effort to end the phase of his presidency focused on getting the country out of its economic mess, and to move on to a search for what is beyond the mess. 
 
 President Obama stuck to broad values such as innovation and making sure American business can succeed, in his State of the Union Address. WSJ's Sudeep Reddy joins Kelly Evans and Jerry Seib for analysis of the president's speech. 
 
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 Yet the vision he sketched out isn't likely to win over skeptics on the right. They think his talk of cutting spending in some areas is more than trumped by his desire to spend more in other areas. And they already doubt his new pledges to ratchet back regulation. 
 
 Nor will the Obama vision be entirely pleasing to his friends on the left, who will be puzzled by his sudden interest in cutting the corporate tax rate and disturbed by the spending cuts they know are coming. "I'm sure there will be plenty of unhappiness about that," a senior Obama aide said just before the speech. 
 
 Obama Addresses the Nation View Slideshow Agence France-Presse/Getty Images President Obama was applauded by Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker John Boehner prior to delivering his State of the Union address. 
 
 Instead, it is a vision designed to be clear and attractive to the broad center of the country—the place where Mr. Obama and his party suffered the most grievous losses over the past two years. Indeed, the State of the Union was the best illustration yet of how the post-election Barack Obama has repositioned himself. 
 
 To those independent voters who abandoned him in November, and to those disillusioned admirers who had begun to doubt that he actually represented the post-partisan leader advertised in 2008, Mr. Obama sketched out a kind of grand political bargain to move the government and the nation in the direction he wants. 
 
 He gave ground to the right and to the business community by offering to reduce a corporate tax rate that he said is holding down American competitiveness. He offered new ways to address conservatives' concerns about medical-malpractice lawsuits. And he offered a shout-out to those who think he has spent recklessly by extending his previous call for a three-year freeze on discretionary domestic spending to five years. 
 
 In return, though, he said he would seek funds to realize his vision of a future where the federal government is active rather than passive in the task of shaping America's economy through education, research and infrastructure spending. The image he summoned to describe this view—the challenge posed by the Soviet Union's Sputnik space launch half a century ago—was meant to recall a time when the government, in a role embraced by a broad swath of Americans, unabashedly led the country in meeting a challenge that seemed almost existential at the time. 
 
 "Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon," Mr. Obama said. "The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist." 
 
 But by "investing in better research and education," the U.S. beat the Soviets to the moon. "This," Mr. Obama declared, "is our generation's Sputnik moment." 
 
 The State of the Union Is... Pick the words that you think best complete the president's sentences. View Interactive Speech Patterns Review the main topics and words used in President Obama's address this year and compare with 2009 and 2010. View Interactive 
 
 Take out the words "Soviet Union" and substitute "China," and replace the description of a race to the moon with a race to protect American economic pre-eminence, and you get the picture Mr. Obama was seeking to convey. 
 
 Above all, the president sought to draw a parallel today to the way in which that race to the moon was won: through a partnership between government and private business, one that was well funded thanks to broad support in the center of the taxpaying public. Implicit in the image is the assertion that Republicans won't undertake a similar mission to win the economic race today. 
 
 Is that a vision the American center can be inspired to embrace today, as it did amid the Cold War? That's the Obama calculation. "What is palpable out there is a desire for a sense about the future," one senior Obama adviser says. 
 
 At the same time, the differences between now and the Sputnik era are significant as well. The government had ample resources then, and sags under deficits now. Trust in government was high then, but has plummeted since. 
 
 Perhaps more important, for many Americans the economic future takes a back seat to lingering fears of the economic present. Many of them are likely to judge the president, as well as his Republican counterparts, above all on how many jobs they can create here and now. 
 
 Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com ||||| Here are the highlights from President Obama's 2015 State of the Union speech, including zingers on climate change and calls for tax reform. (Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post) 
 
 Here are the highlights from President Obama's 2015 State of the Union speech, including zingers on climate change and calls for tax reform. (Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post) 
 
 Emboldened by a stronger economy and a series of recent policy initiatives, President Obama on Tuesday night made clear that he is committed to cementing a liberal legacy and aimed to reframe the broader debate on what constitutes American success. 
 
 In his sixth State of the Union address, Obama celebrated many of the most ambitious, progressive policies he put in place shortly after taking office and called for more — making an unabashed pitch for expansive government action on the economy, scientific research, infrastructure, education and the environment. 
 
 “At this moment — with a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, booming energy production — we have risen from recession freer to write our own future than any other nation on Earth,” Obama said. “It’s now up to us to choose who we want to be over the next 15 years and for decades to come.” 
 
 A year ago, after a difficult start to his second term, the president articulated a narrower set of goals and vowed to pursue them on his own. Now, despite serious losses in the midterms that gave Republicans full control of Congress, the president called for the kind of political bridge-building that propelled his first presidential bid and the inaugural that began his second term. 
 
 Brimming with confidence, the president struck a colloquial tone as he rattled off a series of positive statistics about the country’s recent economic rebound. “This is good news, people,” he reminded hundreds of lawmakers and dignitaries gathered on the House floor. 
 
 Carbon emissions, immigration reform and a minimum wage hike: Which of President Obama's 2014 State of the Union proposals actually got done? The Post's Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, on what flopped and what succeeded. (Julie Percha/The Washington Post) 
 
 He also laid claim to the iconic civil rights legacy of the past — tying together the historic march on Selma, Ala.,with the recent protests in Ferguson, Mo. — and arguing that Americans can find common ground on issues of voting rights and criminal justice. 
 
 The question facing Obama is whether his final two years in the White House can come close to repeating the record of his first two. He has neither the Democratic majority that ushered through major bills revamping the nation’s fiscal and health-care systems, nor the sky-high poll ratings he had shortly after taking office. 
 
 The president is still counting on being able to strike a handful of deals with congressional Republicans, who are now firmly in the majority, and he identified trade as one of the most promising areas where they could find common ground. But Obama emphasized that any efforts to roll back his most significant achievements — including on health care, Wall Street reform, immigration and climate change — would meet fierce resistance. 
 
 Obama’s policy victories have come in two distinct periods. In his first two years, he forged landmark legislation with a Congress led by his Democratic Party. For the past year, he has courted confrontation with congressional Republicans, defying them with go-it-alone initiatives on climate change, immigration and foreign policy. 
 
 Tuesday’s address reflected the latter approach. Rather than striking a tone of compromise, he proposed $320 billion over the next decade in new taxes targeting wealthy individuals and big financial institutions to fund community-college tuition and paid leave for working parents — an idea that has prompted derision from the Republican majority. 
 
 “We will not be limited by what will pass this Congress, because that would be a very boring two years,” White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said in an interview before the speech. 
 
 But the president is not writing off the GOP-controlled House and Senate, aides say. He will need their support if he wants to expand significantly on a domestic policy record that already includes the economic recovery, the Affordable Care Act, the first carbon limits on power plants, regulatory changes for financial institutions and the deferral of possible deportation for millions of illegal immigrants. 
 
 View Graphic The Washington Post looks back at some of the top issues of 2014. 
 
 “For the policy of trade, he’s going to have a different coalition than with the policy of immigration or than with surface transportation,” said James Thurber, a professor who directs American University’s Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies. 
 
 It remains unclear, however, how easy it will be to muster any of those alliances, which would depend in part on Republican leaders’ willingness to edge aside conservatives as the 2016 presidential contest gets underway. 
 
 Another factor beyond the White House’s control is the much-anticipated Supreme Court ruling later this year that could undercut the federal subsidies that help millions of Americans buy plans under the Affordable Care Act. 
 
 “The legacy of the president, and the health-care legacy of the president, depends on those nine people in the Supreme Court,” said Jonathan Oberlander, a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 
 
 For conservative Republicans — such as Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint, who described Obama as “someone who has fundamentally changed our country in a very negative way” — the next two years represent a test of how hard they want to try to dismantle the kind of government he has put in place over the past six years. 
 
 “The challenge is there is no way to stop the president without a confrontation,” said DeMint, adding that GOP lawmakers are worried that forcing a government shutdown would backfire. “Republicans are just very reticent to do that. But the president’s going to keep bullying and overreaching until there’s a pushback.” 
 
 Obama and his aides, by contrast, seem eager for a conflict that will put their differences with the GOP on full display. The president said he is determined to finalize the administration’s proposed rule limiting greenhouse-gas emissions on existing power plants, set aside more public land for conservation and strike a global climate deal when the United Nations convenes negotiations in Paris at the end of the year. 
 
 Obama spoke of his environmental goals in sweeping terms — suggesting there’s a chance “the world will finally reach an agreement to protect the one planet we’ve got.” On race relations, by contrast, he talked in more specific terms. 
 
 “We may have different takes on the events of Ferguson and New York,” he said. “But surely we can understand a father who fears his son can’t walk home without being harassed. Surely we can understand the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the front door at the end of his shift.” 
 
 Foreign policy did not occupy quite as much space in this year’s address, in part because the president is less eager to talk about places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, where Islamist militants continue to battle the United States and its allies. But Obama has accelerated the transfer of prisoners from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in recent months, and he defended his efforts to contain Russian aggression and called for lifting the embargo against Cuba. 
 
 While he did not offer substantive policy concessions to Republicans for much of the nearly hour-long speech, Obama concluded by suggesting the two parties could defy conventional wisdom “if we broke out of these tired old patterns.” 
 
 “We’ve laid a new foundation,” he declared. “A brighter future is ours to write. Let’s begin this new chapter — together — and let’s start the work right now.”
– President Obama's second State of the Union address probably won't win over many critics from the left or right, but he did an impressive—at times even Reaganesque—job of pitching to the center, pundits say. "The point wasn't soaring rhetoric or soothing the nation," notes Joshua Green at the Atlantic. The speech seem designed to recast the president's image "as someone who has finally gotten the message that he should be focused on jobs, jobs, jobs." The speech didn't soar, but it charted "ways to get over, under, around and through some of the roadblocks that stand in the way of Obama's policy proposals" on energy, education, and infrastructure," writes Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post. The substance of the speech was "moderate liberalism—we like business, but government has a role, too," writes Jonathan Chait at the New Republic. Obama, he decides, set out his vision of American unity more clearly than he's done before. The theme of the address was "winning the future," but "It also could have been labeled, "winning the center," writes Gerald F. Seib at the Wall Street Journal. The speech, with its focus on the future beyond the economic mess, was "the best illustration yet of how the post-election Barack Obama has repositioned himself" to win back voters who abandoned him in November, he writes.