Obama’s plans for final year face mulish Congress, Hillary Clinton campaign

President Obama has vowed to pursue an activist agenda in his final year in office on everything from gun control to climate change, but he’s likely to be limited in his ambitions by poor relations with Congress, a desire not to step on would-be Democratic successor Hillary Clinton’s toes and national security challenges beyond his control.

The president will outline his plans in the State of the Union address on Jan. 12, but his prospects for moving significant legislation in Congress in 2016 are slim. Other than a bipartisan criminal-justice reform bill and possible action on a free trade deal with Pacific Rim nations, there are no other major initiatives by a lame-duck president in an election year that are likely to succeed.

That means much of Mr. Obama’s agenda, from environmental regulations to the highly anticipated action on guns to the slow-motion closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, will come through executive action, a go-it-alone strategy that he has employed for most of his second term.

“Obama will stress executive action; it’s the only thing he can do,” said Charles Lipson, a political science professor at the University of Chicago. “But he’s constrained in a second way: He’s got a member of his own party” — Mrs. Clinton — “who after the primaries will try to run to the center.”

The president, who knows that a Clinton presidency is the most likely way to preserve his legacy in areas such as health care and climate change, will try to do no harm to her campaign.

“Given that Hillary is going to be the nominee unless she’s indicted, she can count on President Obama not trying to undermine her position,” Mr. Lipson said.

There are two decisions looming outside the purview of the White House that could seriously complicate the president’s final year — a Pentagon inspector general’s investigation into whether military aides “scrubbed” intelligence reports to give Mr. Obama an overly rosy view of the fight against the Islamic State and a Supreme Court ruling on the future of affirmative action. It’s not known when the watchdog’s probe of the Defense Department will conclude; the high court ruling is expected by the end of June.

Publicly and behind closed doors, Mr. Obama is reminding aides that it’s the final half of the “fourth quarter” of his presidency, and he still feels an urgency to push his progressive agenda.

“I’ve never been more optimistic about a year ahead than I am right now,” Mr. Obama said in his final news conference of the year. “In 2016 I’m going to leave it out all on the field.”

But as he enters his last year in office, Mr. Obama seems to be in a rut as far as his ability to rally Americans to support his proposals.

While pundits have been talking about “Obama fatigue” for years, recent polls are bearing out the notion that the public has grown weary of the president. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll this month found 73 percent of respondents want the next president to pursue a “different approach” from Mr. Obama, while only 25 percent want to follow a similar course.

While the unemployment rate has dropped to 5 percent, the lowest of Mr. Obama’s presidency, people don’t feel reassured about the economy or their personal financial security. A national survey by the Pew Research Center last week found that Americans are less optimistic about how the economy will perform over the next year, with only 20 percent expecting conditions to improve. A year ago, the same poll found that 31 percent of respondents expected the economy to get better.

Pew researchers found that attitudes about the economy today are similar to January 2008, near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, a few months before the financial crisis hit.

Foreign policy and national security, often the focal points of second-term presidents, don’t look promising for Mr. Obama’s legacy as he heads into 2016. The terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, California, have renewed criticism of Mr. Obama’s handling of the Islamic State and placed national security ahead as the top concern of Americans in polls, ahead of the economy.

While the president has repeatedly told the public about steps to beef up the military coalition fighting the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, he also is trying to lower expectations about keeping the homeland completely safe, saying the extremists’ use of social media and “lone wolf” attacks make it more difficult for authorities to prevent attacks.

In an interview last week with NPR, Mr. Obama said the Islamic State “is not an organization that can destroy the United States.”

“This is not a huge industrial power that can pose great risks to us institutionally or in a systematic way,” Mr. Obama said. “The most damage they can do, though, is if they start changing how we live and what our values are, and part of my message over the next 14 months or 13 months that I remain in office is to just make sure that we remember who we are and make sure that our resilience, our values, our unity are maintained. If we do that, then [Islamic State] will be defeated.”

Mr. Lipson said a terrorist attack is the “wild card” for Mr. Obama’s final year in office.

“If there are any successful large-scale terrorist attacks then I think the president’s position is deeply eroded,” he said.

He included the possibility of high-profile crimes by illegal immigrants in so-called “sanctuary cities” as another crisis that would undermine Mr. Obama’s authority in particular and Democrats’ standing in general.

“Anything that goes wrong there, the Republicans will try to pin the tail on the Democratic donkey for failing in its fundamental duty to protect the public,” Mr. Lipson said.

Mr. Obama also is still pressing to close the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention facility in Cuba, whether by executive action or through a slower process of releasing prisoners to countries willing to accept them. The administration is preparing for one of the largest transfers of detainees since 2007, action that could reduce the prisoner population to as low as 90 by the end of January.

There are 107 detainees still being held at Guantanamo, of whom 48 have been approved for release, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lawmakers in both parties have consistently blocked Mr. Obama’s plans to close the facility and transfer the remaining detainees to prisons on the mainland U.S.

In Congress, one of the few prospects for action in 2016 is the bipartisan proposal on criminal-justice reform, which would reduce the length of mandatory minimum sentences and limit them to serious drug felonies and violent crimes.

The Senate bill would ban solitary confinement for juveniles, and it would grant judges more flexibility on sentences for a range of crimes. The measure also would support re-entry programs in federal prisons aimed at reducing recidivism.

Mr. Obama has been ramping up his efforts at granting clemency to prisoners convicted of drug crimes, many under sentencing guidelines developed in the 1980s in response to the popularity of crack cocaine. On Dec. 18 Mr. Obama commuted the sentences of 91 federal prison inmates, bringing the total during his presidency to 184, the most since the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson.

On trade, the president is hoping that Congress will approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a massive free trade deal that is the economic centerpiece of his second term. Democrats and some Republicans oppose the agreement, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Republican, has said he might postpone consideration of the pact until after the November elections.

Before leaving Washington for his annual two-week vacation in Hawaii, Mr. Obama said he is counting on Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Wisconsin Republican, to push the trade deal over the finish line next year.

“There are both proponents and opponents of this in both Democratic and Republican parties, and so it’s going to be an interesting situation where we’re going to have to stitch together the same kind of bipartisan effort in order for us to get it done,” he said.