Biden comes out fighting
The US president has started campaigning already. Matthew Partridge reports
US president Joe Biden began his final annual State of the Union address to Congress before November’s pivotal US election with “public expectations at rock bottom”, says The Observer. However, he returned to the White House “with all flags flying and the cheers of grateful (and relieved) Democrats ringing in his ears”. He survived “what could easily have turned into a wake for his unpopular presidency”, and delivered a “combative, bravura performance” – a “personal mini-triumph” that has, at least for now, “boosted faith in his ability to win a second term”.
Losing the ugly contest
Biden’s re-election efforts are already struggling, says The Economist. Both Biden and Donald Trump are unpopular, but polls suggest that Biden “is leading the unpopularity contest”, with one recent survey suggesting that nearly three-quarters of voters think the president too old to run. Biden trails Trump narrowly in national polls, and Trump has “opened leads in key swing states”. Trump also “has the confidence of more Americans when it comes to issues they consider critical, such as handling the economy and securing the border”.
One speech will not, of course, fix “Biden’s abysmal numbers”, says Edward Luce in the Financial Times. But it “sets the tone” for how he plans to run his campaign, and his “feisty display” ought to “put an end to speculation that he might still consider stepping down”. The “overly partisan” nature of the address may have marked a break with “traditional etiquette”, but it made it clear that Biden’s “bipartisan gloves have come off”.
The Republican party’s “stony-faced response” to what would, under other circumstances, be “easy conservative applause lines” on border security and Ukraine, was telling.
Four more years of rancour
Biden and Trump are now in control of enough delegates to be mathematically certain of their party’s nomination, so we are now set for “perhaps the most unusual campaign in US history”, says Gary Murphy in The Sunday Times. It will involve a former president for the first time in over a century, and one with huge ongoing legal problems to boot. It will present Americans with a stark choice between “colour and chaos on the one hand and stability and civility on the other”.
Hardly, says The Wall Street Journal. State of the Union addresses are always “eminently forgettable”, but Biden’s was “memorable for all the wrong reasons”. It was “extraordinary” – “one long, divisive pep rally for Democrats” that goaded and sneered at Republicans throughout the speech, lectured Israel on morality while letting Hamas off the hook,and took aim at “multiple and various villains for partisan attacks”. Indeed, his list of political enemies is “longer than Trump’s”. The speech was, in short, not really a State of the Union address at all, but a “campaign rally”, with nothing to offer Nikki Haley voters or Republicans who don’t want a Trump second term. In its divisiveness, it could therefore have the effect of encouraging third-party candidacies. “Every bit as much as Donald Trump, the Joe Biden in the well of the House… promised four more years of dispiriting rancour.”