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The second reason to listen was timing. The speech came immediately after Super Tuesday, when the dreary prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch became, it seems, inevitable.
As an overture to the general election, Biden’s speech was stunningly aggressive. He punched his, uh, “predecessor” in the rhetorical nose immediately and kept jabbing. In the process, Biden previewed his themes. He will run on amped-up versions of age-old issues. “Those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the electoral power of women,” Biden declared, with equal contempt for Trump and his Supreme Court appointees.
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After abortion rights came the Democratic evergreen of health-care reform. “We finally beat Big Pharma,” he declared. Elect him again and he will pursue price caps for “500 drugs over the next decade.” The cost of all prescription drugs could be capped “at $2,000 per year for everyone,” he offered. And how about $400 per month to ease the pain of higher interest rates on mortgages?
No one needed to guess where the money might come. Billionaires and corporations paying “their fare share.” So, we learned nothing there.
Third (though many Biden’s partisans don’t want to hear it): The public has questions about a man in his 80s seeking a second term. Watching Biden stand and deliver an hour-plus speech late in the evening was one way of seeking some answers.
No doubt most people saw what they wanted to see. It is well known that Biden has fought a lifetime battle with a speech impediment. Every speech he has ever given is a trove of blips, stumbles and swallowed words that his friends admire as signs of courage, while his enemies can mine for Fox segments, viral memes and Tik Toks. This speech was no different.
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I watched with a memory front and center of a speech I heard Biden give in Washington last July. He was sharp and forceful; he moved nimbly between prepared text and ad-libs. In the 35-odd years I’ve listened to Biden, that speech was as good or better than anything I’d heard from him. No one ever called Joe Biden the Great Communicator.
I think it’s fair to describe the audience reaction that night as surprised. The audience for this State of the Union might say the same thing. Biden was high-energy. He managed a give-and-take with hecklers. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was clearly flummoxed. He looked like a man passing a kidney stone when Biden put his knife into the GOP refusal to vote on conservative Sen. James Lankford’s immigration bill. “The Border Patrol union has endorsed this bill,” Biden said as Lankford (Okla.) nodded and Johnson squirmed. “Simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border — or we can fix it.”
Job one for Team Biden was to put an end to murmurs in the Democratic Party about somehow pushing the old man out of the car. The State of the Union — for decades an event in search of a purpose — managed that. Like him or not, America, Biden is headed for the November ballot.
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There’s no need, and rarely much excuse, for State of the Union speeches. The Constitution mandates that the president make periodic reports on the subject to Congress, but for much of our history, the reports were printed on paper and read at leisure. Somehow, Americans got by without self-aggrandizing rhetoric, without feel-good guests waving from the galleries, without performative ovations. No catcalls, no members of Congress snapping selfies, no theatrical rending of paper by a House speaker. Bliss.
By the low standards of this unfortunate annual exercise, however, Thursday’s address was noteworthy. There were at least three reasons for watching. First, the world is in flux; in places, it’s in flames. Serious people wanted to hear President Biden tell us how he thinks about this and what he intends to do.
On that score, it was a mediocre speech. Biden opened strong, by connecting today’s crisis to the moment in 1941 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt accurately warned Congress of the price of isolationism. “If anybody in this room thinks [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you he will not,” Biden said with a steely eye for the House Republicans who are blocking aid to Ukraine. And he properly tagged “my predecessor” — a term he used again and again rather than speak the name Donald Trump — for “bowing down to a Russian leader.”
But Biden moved away quickly from the world, and only returned to it at the end of his speech, long after the eardrums began to harden to his relentless fortissimo. Biden has only two notes in his oratorical scale: loud and a couple of pals talking. He was right about China, saying that conventional wisdom about America falling behind has “got it wrong.” And he grappled with the Gaza crisis — a political nightmare fueled by Israel’s pro-Trump leader — by announcing an intervention to open a pier for humanitarian aid. Both messages arrived late as throwaways. Hard to imagine that any love for the Biden foreign policy was born despite the urgency of the hour.
The second reason to listen was timing. The speech came immediately after Super Tuesday, when the dreary prospect of a Biden-Trump rematch became, it seems, inevitable.
As an overture to the general election, Biden’s speech was stunningly aggressive. He punched his, uh, “predecessor” in the rhetorical nose immediately and kept jabbing. In the process, Biden previewed his themes. He will run on amped-up versions of age-old issues. “Those bragging about overturning Roe v. Wade have no clue about the electoral power of women,” Biden declared, with equal contempt for Trump and his Supreme Court appointees.
After abortion rights came the Democratic evergreen of health-care reform. “We finally beat Big Pharma,” he declared. Elect him again and he will pursue price caps for “500 drugs over the next decade.” The cost of all prescription drugs could be capped “at $2,000 per year for everyone,” he offered. And how about $400 per month to ease the pain of higher interest rates on mortgages?
No one needed to guess where the money might come. Billionaires and corporations paying “their fare share.” So, we learned nothing there.
Third (though many Biden’s partisans don’t want to hear it): The public has questions about a man in his 80s seeking a second term. Watching Biden stand and deliver an hour-plus speech late in the evening was one way of seeking some answers.
No doubt most people saw what they wanted to see. It is well known that Biden has fought a lifetime battle with a speech impediment. Every speech he has ever given is a trove of blips, stumbles and swallowed words that his friends admire as signs of courage, while his enemies can mine for Fox segments, viral memes and Tik Toks. This speech was no different.
I watched with a memory front and center of a speech I heard Biden give in Washington last July. He was sharp and forceful; he moved nimbly between prepared text and ad-libs. In the 35-odd years I’ve listened to Biden, that speech was as good or better than anything I’d heard from him. No one ever called Joe Biden the Great Communicator.
I think it’s fair to describe the audience reaction that night as surprised. The audience for this State of the Union might say the same thing. Biden was high-energy. He managed a give-and-take with hecklers. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was clearly flummoxed. He looked like a man passing a kidney stone when Biden put his knife into the GOP refusal to vote on conservative Sen. James Lankford’s immigration bill. “The Border Patrol union has endorsed this bill,” Biden said as Lankford (Okla.) nodded and Johnson squirmed. “Simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border — or we can fix it.”
Job one for Team Biden was to put an end to murmurs in the Democratic Party about somehow pushing the old man out of the car. The State of the Union — for decades an event in search of a purpose — managed that. Like him or not, America, Biden is headed for the November ballot.
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