WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will propose in his State of the Union address a package of modest initiatives aimed at helping middle-class families, including tax credits for child care, caps on some student- loan payments and a requirement that companies let workers save automatically for retirement, senior administration officials said Sunday.

By focusing on what one White House official calls “the sandwich generation” — struggling families squeezed between sending their children to college and caring for elderly parents — Obama hopes to use his speech Wednesday to demonstrate that he understands the economic pain of ordinary Americans. The proposals also include expanded tax credits for retirement savings and money for programs to help families care for elderly relatives.

The address is still being written, but one senior official, describing it on condition of anonymity, said its key themes would include “creating good jobs, addressing the deficit, helping the middle class and changing Washington.”

With his poll numbers down and Democrats fearing disaster in this year’s midterm elections, Obama is at a particularly rocky point in his presidency. He heads into his first formal State of the Union speech in a radically reshaped political climate from even one week ago. His top domestic priority, a health care overhaul, is in jeopardy after the Republican victory in last week’s Massachusetts Senate race.

White House advisers have interpreted the Massachusetts defeat as a reflection of Americans’ deep anger and frustration over high unemployment and Wall Street bailouts.

The president’s proposals are intended to appeal to people who are struggling financially without looking like another broad expansion of the federal government. They also would add little to the federal deficit at a time when Obama is pledging to reduce it.

While Obama has been shifting his focus toward job creation in recent weeks, an official said the president also wanted to spotlight “critical areas where middle-class families need a helping hand to get ahead” — such as paying for college and saving for retirement.

For example, the president is calling on Congress to nearly double the child-care tax credit for families earning less than $85,000 — a proposal that, if adopted, would lower by $900 the taxes such families owe to the government. But the credit would not be refundable, meaning that families would not get extra money back on a tax refund.

Another of the president’s proposals, a cap on a student’s federal loan payments to 10 percent of income, above a basic living allowance, would cost taxpayers roughly $1 billion.

The expanded financing to help families care for elderly relatives would cost $102.5 million — a pittance in a federal budget where programs are often measured in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

The automatic-paycheck-deduction program for retirement would simply be a way to encourage workers to save and would include tax credits to help companies with administrative costs.

Such programs are, notably, much less far-reaching than Obama’s expansive first-year agenda of passing an economic-recovery package, bailing out the auto industry, overhauling the health care system, passing energy legislation and imposing tough new restrictions on banks — an agenda that has left him vulnerable to criticism that he is using government to remake every aspect of American society.

Address to fit themes

Obama and Vice President Joe Biden plan to outline the proposals today when they meet with the White House task force that has spent the past year examining ways to help the middle class.

Top advisers to the president insist that Obama is not in retreat and are resisting any comparisons to the kind of small-bore initiatives that the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, used to try to get his presidency back on track.

“In no way does this represent a trimming of the sails,” one said Sunday, referring to the package.

Instead, the White House wants to use Wednesday’s address to fit initiatives such as the health care overhaul into the broader theme of jobs and the economy.

How Obama will address health care in the State of the Union speech, though, remains an open question. Officials on Capitol Hill and in the White House said they do not expect Congress to decide how far- reaching a health care bill it can now consider by Wednesday, putting Obama in the awkward position of talking about a measure that is on shaky ground.

Another open question is what the president will say about his program for job creation.

David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” said Obama’s current predicament is no surprise.

“A year ago, I said to the president, ‘A year from now, your numbers are going to be much different than they are right now’ because of the economic forecast that we were hearing,” he said, adding, “And we knew that, even as the economy started growing, it would take time for the jobs to follow.”

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