I t was clear within its first minutes that Joe Biden’s address before a joint session of Congress on Thursday night would go down as one of the most partisan campaign speeches ever to masquerade as a State of the Union.
Biden hit the podium and launched into attacks on his Republican counterparts in Congress for failing to approve a new tranche of aid to Ukraine. Although not by name, he savaged his likely opponent in the fall for “bowing down to a Russian leader.” Indeed, the president’s rhetorical assaults on his “predecessor” flowed freely throughout the evening. Those jabs were interspersed with efforts to goad and even mock those Republicans present, alternating between condemnations of their legislative paralysis (on their failure to pass the bipartisan Senate supplemental dealing with the border crisis, for example) or their extremism (including the Alabama supreme court’s decision that initially threatened access to IVF procedures). Don’t dwell on the contradictions — Biden didn’t.
Moreover, the president locked himself into positions he may soon come to regret. As Phil wrote, Biden’s uncalled-for castigation of Israel’s failure to commit substantial resources and energies to the distribution of humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip — which, as a matter of fact, is a false claim — was uncalled for and unproductive. He lent undue credence to Hamas’s casualty figures — numbers that, it is no stretch to say, the terrorist group simply makes up. His proposal for a makeshift port in Gaza through which the United States can distribute aid is a massive and risky logistical undertaking that will complicate Israel’s war, delaying the victory that both Jerusalem and Joe Biden need. The president’s plan to subsidize housing demand in a market strained by limited inventory and crunched by rising interest rates, which are designed to reduce demand, would contribute to the inflationary pressures Americans so deeply resent. In terms of policy, the president rattled off a litany of items on the progressive wish list that will never happen, setting himself up for the deserved hard feelings among his base when he fails to deliver.
Biden may regret all this. But he won’t come to regret it anytime soon. The president had one job to perform yesterday: reassure his increasingly panicky base that he could perform at par. And that’s what he did.
Biden’s opponents deserve some of the blame for the high marks the president will receive in coming days. Along with Biden’s allies, they set expectations for this speech imprudently low. To hear Republicans in conservative media outlets tell it, if Biden merely managed basic cogency and some outwardly observable vigor for all of 75 straight minutes, it would be a feat. He more than met those expectations. He had the Democrats in the chamber eating out of the palm of his hand. In the wake of Biden’s speech, Democratic partisans were positively giddy just to see that Biden was, in fact, capable of delivering a boilerplate stump speech well past his bedtime. Their confidence was restored. In the coming days, that sentiment will percolate throughout the political ecosystem, filtering down to the Democratic rank and file. It would not be surprising to see the slack in Biden’s support among what should be Democratic voters tighten.
Indeed, in a moment of clever jujutsu, Biden might have done himself some good among swing voters who are deeply concerned about the border and migrant crisis. Prior to the speech, Biden was confronted by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), who demanded the president devote his attention to Laken Riley, a young nursing student whose alleged killer is an illegal immigrant. “Say her name,” Greene demanded. She perhaps thought she was setting herself up well for her long-planned heckle of the president. But when she barked her objections to the president’s conduct during his address, Biden took her up on the charge — acknowledging the pain of the young woman’s death for Riley’s family at the hands of “an illegal.”
Today, all the right people are furious with Biden over his failure to use properly sanitized language when describing illegal migrants who kill Americans. “Let me be clear: No human being is illegal,” sneered Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.). “There was a lot of good in President Biden’s speech tonight, but his rhetoric about immigrants was incendiary and wrong,” her colleague, Representative Joaquin Castro (D., Texas), mourned. Joe Biden’s staff just cannot stand it when progressives are even mildly irritated with them, so the president may feel compelled to repair the damage his remark has done. But he shouldn’t. In summoning just some of the passion voters feel toward the immigration crisis over which Biden has presided, he might convey to voters that he isn’t as detached from their suffering as progressives seem to be. Creating some distance between himself and the small band of progressive purists who have done his presidency no favors could only pay dividends in the fall.
As a State of the Union address, Biden’s will not be remembered fondly. But if it is remembered at all, it would be a truly unique one. Even if no one will recall much of what Biden said on Thursday night, many may remember how Biden made them feel. For Republicans, it reminded them why they oppose this president. But for Democrats who were rapidly losing faith in Biden, it likely reassured them that he was, in fact, up for one more race. If that was the president’s foremost political priority, he more than achieved it.