U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris stands and applauds while Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy remains seated while President Joe Biden delivers his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., February 7, 2023.LEAH MILLIS/Reuters
With worries about inflation persisting, with sizable chunks of his Republican rivals concerned about the extent of American support of Ukraine in its war with Russia, and with remnants of a Chinese balloon that travelled across the continental United States being scavenged from the Atlantic Ocean deeps, President Joe Biden in his State of the Union remarks nonetheless projected buoyant optimism and a prideful sense of achievement.
The Constitution requires presidents to issue a report on the nation’s health, and Mr. Biden’s address Tuesday night was the 99th to be delivered in person – but was among the few that were unalloyed campaign stump speeches.
This hoary ritual, first performed by George Washington, commanded what likely will be the largest television audience of any political speech in the year before the first primaries and caucuses of the presidential campaign season. Mr. Biden used the occasion – an ancient formality but in recent decades an interminable and inconsequential evening declamation – to preview both the style and substance of what he insists will be his drive for a second term.
The political scientists Donna Hoffman of Northern Iowa University and Alison Howard of Dominican University of California have found that, since Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 address, only a quarter of the presidential proposals aired in these annual addresses have been fully enacted.
Mr. Biden cannot plausibly expect even that much of the agenda he set out – especially bringing Big Pharma to heel, enacting a billionaire minimum tax, banning assault weapons, restoring the federal right to legal abortion abolished by the Supreme Court last year – to be approved by a divided Congress. But in this case, policy proposals such as those he unveiled Tuesday, including “a blue-collar blueprint to remake America,” are more important than legislative production, for they project the campaign themes Mr. Biden plans to employ in next year’s election.
The President’s mien may have been sunny, but his political outlook is cloudy; he has a 43.5-per-cent approval rating, worse than the second-year rating of any modern president except Donald Trump, according to the FiveThirtyEight polling composite. And though only a fifth of Americans want him to run again, according to the latest YouGov poll, Mr. Biden is plowing ahead, and his remarks suggested that he will campaign as an effective executive open to seeking bipartisan comity.
There were classic Biden touches throughout – his relentless optimism (speaking of American “progress and resilience”); his native congeniality (with generous salutes to his principal Capitol opponents, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell); his continuing effort to distinguish himself from Mr. Trump (“our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken”); his patented Biden blarney (telling his Republican foes he would fly to their districts for the groundbreaking of local bridges and roadways in his signature infrastructure legislation); his whispery compassion (in a reference to Tyre Nichols, who was beaten to death in Memphis last month and whose parents were in the balcony gallery); and his belief in putting the national interest above partisan advantage (“Fighting for the sake of fighting ... gets us nowhere”).
Even so, the newly empowered Republicans who took control of the House of Representatives last month have little inclination or taste for co-operating with the Democratic President, whose principal asset as a candidate is that he was able to defeat Mr. Trump. Some of his remarks, especially on the combustible issue of extending the debt limit, produced jeers from the Republican side of the chamber – and a few angry cries of “liar” and a shouted claim that the fentanyl crisis was “your fault.”
He did manoeuvre Republicans to support his priority of preserving Social Security, the income supplement for older Americans, and Medicare, the health care plan for Americans older than 65.
One of the principal audiences of his remarks were Democrats uneasy about the notion of another Biden campaign. Though four out of five Democrats have a favorable view of his performance, only two Democrats in five want him to run again, according to the YouGov poll.
That is why – with an eye to the Democratic lawmakers in the chamber and to progressives across the country – he took pains to claim robust job creation; boast of “near record unemployment for African-Americans and Hispanics”; remind listeners he backed legislation to force the wealthy and big corporations to “begin to pay their fair share”; speak of new electric grids, clean energy and expanded numbers of electric-vehicle charging stations; and tell the working Americans who once were the core of the Democratic Party but who, beginning in the Ronald Reagan years and accelerating under Mr. Trump, have drifted into the GOP coalition, “I have your back.”
The preparation of these annual messages is a Washington preoccupation that dominates capital life for months; lobbyists and bureaucrats alike work tirelessly to insert, or preserve, even a phrase in the remarks that they can point to as evidence of presidential favour.
But rarely are such speeches remade in the context of a fresh national challenge such as the flight of the Chinese balloon from the northern plains to East Coast beach towns – an episode that almost certainly added to the half of Americans who last October told the Pew Research Center they regard China’s military power as a “very serious” problem. A late addition to the speech included Mr. Biden’s vow, “If China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country – and we did.”
He also spoke of Ukraine’s battle against Russia as “a test for the ages, a test for America, a test for the world” – remarks that were a 2023 version of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1942 State of the Union message describing the famous Four Freedoms, the last of which (’freedom from fear”) vowed that “no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour.”
But in the end, it is the words of Abraham Lincoln, in his 1862 State of the Union message, more than the remarks of Mr. Biden, that have the greatest consequence for this era.
“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history,” the 16th President said from the very podium where Mr. Biden stood. “We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us.”