Biden’s high-profile speech: flunking the Churchill test
History teaches us that every occupant of the White House gets two presidencies, said The Washington Post: the one they planned for, and the one that events thrust upon them. When Joe Biden came into office his main objectives were “crushing the pandemic, restructuring the economy via trillions in new federal spending, and unifying the bitterly divided body politic”. As he gave his first State of the Union address last week, Biden could boast of solid progress on the first of those aims, but less so on the others. His most ambitious economic proposals have failed to get through Congress, where partisanship is as toxic as ever. As for Biden’s plans for a foreign-policy pivot to China, these have been destroyed by the Ukraine crisis, which looks set to consume a large part of Biden’s attention for the rest of his term.
The war in Ukraine presents huge challenges, said Dalibor Rohac in the New York Post, but it also gave Biden “an opportunity of almost Churchillian dimensions to bring Americans together”. His high-profile speech last week was a chance to set out what is at stake in this conflict; to explain the threat it poses to America’s interests and core values. But Biden mostly stuck to “feel-good displays of solidarity” with the Ukrainian people. Biden missed the moment in his address, agreed The Wall Street Journal. “This was not Harry Truman at the dawn of the Cold War calling the world to meet a new danger.”
Biden rightly put Ukraine at the top of his speech, said Bloomberg, but the bulk of the address dealt with domestic issues. This part, too, left something to be desired. While it’s not Biden’s fault that America’s politicians are so divided – Donald Trump and his “Republican enablers” are the real culprits here – he hasn’t done as much as he could to seek bipartisan support for moderate policies. The notable exception was the part of his speech where he scorned the radical “defund the police” slogan and supported more police funding. Otherwise, he mostly just offered a rehash of the same domestic agenda the senate has rejected. If he was heading for victory in the midterm elections this might make sense, but Biden has been lagging (although his speech delivered a poll bounce) and needs a fresh approach. “By creating a moment of clarity and common purpose, the Ukraine emergency offered the president a chance to reset. Unfortunately, he chose not to deviate.”