Obama's state of the union address may leave climate out in the cold

US president will focus on jobs and the economy in speech to address voter dissatisfaction

Ewen MacAskill and Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 January 2010 19.50 GMT
Barack Obama is to respond to last week's shock Senate election defeat by using Wednesday's state of the union speech to scale back his ambitious legislative programme and instead focus on measures to help recession-hit families.
Obama opened his presidency last year at breakneck speed, with proposals to tackle the recession, climate change and health, as well as deal with two wars.
But the state of the union speech is shaping up as a much more modest affair, reflecting voter complaints – apparent in last week's Massachusetts election, in which Republican Scott Brown won a surprise victory – about his healthcare plan, the billions of dollars in federal spending and failure to tackle unemployment. Although the White House denied Obama was scaling back his plans, the tone will be more populist and tightly focused on jobs and the economy.
An official said that one of the themes would be "creating good jobs, addressing the deficit, changing Washington", and fighting for working-class families.
The Massachusetts defeat has created panic among Democratic members of Congress fearful of losing their seats in November's mid-term elections. The influential Rothenburg report today suggested 58 Democratic seats in the House of Representatives were vulnerable, up from 47 last month.
Obama's healthcare reform bill, which he had hoped to have passed into law by the time he delivered the state of the union speech, looks as if it could be an early victim of the election loss.
Democrats are threatening to ditch much of the health bill, an issue on which Obama had fought the election, promising to expand health insurance coverage to almost all Americans.
Another signature issue, global warming, is at risk of getting short shrift in the speech, further shrinking the already slim prospects of getting a climate change law through Congress, environmentalists say.
"I think the president needs to underscore that climate and energy reform is a priority for 2010 as specifically as possible," said John Kerry, who has been leading the effort to get a climate bill through the Senate.
Environmental organisations believe some Obama aides are advising the president to downplay or even avoid mention of the words "climate change".
"There has always been nervousness on whether the administration is playing an aggressive enough role," said Steve Cochran, of the Environmental Defence Fund. "[Everyone is] looking to see what he might say in the state of the union to suggest the administration continues to move forward on this agenda, or that they are going to back off somehow because of a variety of political realities."
In a practice run for the speech, Obama today set out various proposals to help working-class families, such as doubling the childcare tax credit for families earning less than $85,000 (about £52,000) a year, a move that could be worth $900 for each family.
The aim, Obama said, was to help ease the way for families who had been "pounded by the full fury of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression".