Biden’s stump speech
TIME FOR U.S. TO GET RID OF THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS
BLUSTERY, ABUSIVE AND UNTRUTHFUL STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESSES ARE A LOT TO ASK THE NATION TO ENDURE.
— J.D. TUCCILLE
As constitutionally mandated administrative reports go, U.S. President Joe Biden’s 2024 state of the union address was quite the jackedup campaign speech. Biden’s team knew that expectations were low for a man who frequently has senior moments of forgetfulness, as well as verbal stumbles in public, but they managed to please the faithful by putting a bit more vim than usual in the president’s presentation. The speech was neither coherent nor content-rich, let alone necessary. But for several minutes, it was at least loud.
“History is watching, just like history watched three years ago on Jan. 6,” Biden yelled a bit more than five minutes into a speech that was somewhat delayed by anti-israel protests. “Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy. Many of you were here on that darkest of days. We all saw with our own eyes these insurrectionists were not patriots. They’d come to stop the peaceful transfer of power, to overstern the will of the people.”
“Overstern” was supposed to be “overturn,” but that’s not a terrible fumble for a president who was famously inarticulate, even before his mental acuity began to slip. His shouty delivery, at least in the early minutes, won praise from fans in the media who described it as “energetic” and “feisty.” But that’s not to say the public was moved.
“Roughly three in 10 Americans say President Joe Biden outperformed their expectations at Thursday’s state of the union address,” an Ipsos poll found after the fact. “While the president exceeded expectations for some, his approval rating on key issues remains unchanged, as the majority disapprove of his handling of the economy, crime and the Israel/hamas war, among others.”
The problem, many observers suggest, is that the speech did little more than repackage the claims and charges that have characterized the president’s past political speeches. Doing so accompanied by an extra pot of coffee just isn’t that persuasive.
“Turning up the volume to sell assertions that people don’t fundamentally believe won’t make them more convincing,” wrote David Winston in Roll Call. “Nor will an aggressive, if not downright angry, delivery.”
Angry is right. Biden not only invoked the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot by supporters of Donald Trump, he repeatedly attacked his predecessor (and near-certain return opponent in the November election) as an enemy of democracy.
“In his state of the union address last night President Biden cast himself as the defender of democracy who would jail former President Donald Trump,” observed Steven Calabresi, a professor of constitutional law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. He warned that, “One of the key causes of the death of democracy is the criminalization of political disagreements.”
Biden also “did what was once unthinkable,” as NBC News’s Natasha Korecki put it, deriding the Supreme Court justices who were present (several, understandably, rarely attend these events) for their controversial decision stripping federal protection from abortion and returning the issue to the states.
The rest of the speech involved defending his unpopular performance on the economy and stumping for costly policy goals that his administration hopes to implement, including subsidies for housing and higher education. He also, jarringly, found time to demand the wealthy pay their “fair share in taxes,” even as his son faces charges for tax evasion.
None of this is new. Calabresi added that, “Former President Trump and House Republicans are just as guilty of criminalizing politics as is the Biden administration,” and that, “Former President Barack Obama started this recent descent into the criminalizing of politics.” Criminal investigations and tax inquisitions of opponents by those in power are now a regular feature of American political life.
More on point, President Trump’s initial speech to Congress (technically not a state of the union address, since he was new in office) was apocalyptic, invoking “American carnage” in portraying a supposedly collapsing country. His subsequent addresses were, as is now common, factually sketchy political sales pitches.
In truth, blustery, abusive and untruthful state of the union addresses are a lot to ask the nation to endure based on no more than a loose constitutional directive that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
Regarding George Washington’s verbal addresses to Congress as monarchical and unworthy of a republic, Thomas Jefferson chose to submit a written report to Congress, and this is how it was done throughout the 19th century and into the 20th.
Appropriately, the state of the union report was converted back to an in-person speech by the monarchical Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Americans have suffered through the restored pageant ever since. The addresses are sometimes eloquent, other times incoherent and occasionally unifying. More recently, they’ve become exercises in ginning-up votes on the public dime without dipping into campaign coffers.
Yet state of the union addresses aren’t even very effective at rallying the faithful. Among those who watched Biden’s address, “the 65 per cent who had a positive view of the speech was actually lower than any such speech CNN has polled in the past quarter-century — the previous low being Donald Trump’s 2018 address (70 per cent),” Aaron Blake noted in the Washington Post.
Trump went on to lose his 2020 bid for re-election, of course. Biden may beat the performance of his predecessor (and repeat opponent) in November, but it’s doubtful that it will have anything to do with last week’s speech. There was no boost. Realclear’s average of polls currently puts the president’s approval at 40 per cent and disapproval at 55.5 per cent, which is essentially unchanged since December.
If Joe Biden and his successors want to spare themselves such thankless ordeals in the future, who could blame them for reviving the practice of sending over state of the union messages in memo form? Perhaps even an email would do the trick. The rest of us would, no doubt, thank them for the courtesy.
THEY’VE BECOME EXERCISES IN GINNING-UP VOTES ON THE PUBLIC DIME.