After State of the Union, campaign messages are set
BRETTON WOODS, N.H. — You can go to sleep for a year, maybe more. You may as well terminate your cable service — unless, of course, you want to binge on college basketball. And as for social media blasts, you can live without them.
Because precisely a year from now, when the Republican presidential candidates are sloshing through the snow here in New Hampshire and President Joe Biden is firming up his support in the newly enshrined South Carolina Democratic primary, all those Rip Van Winkles and cable-cutters won’t be any less informed than those who tuned on Feb. 7 to Biden’s State of the Union Address and the Republican response from Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas.
It was commonplace the last few days to argue that Biden opened his re-election campaign on Tuesday with a stump speech from the rostrum of the House of Representatives — the 99th time that a president addressed a joint session of Congress. He was conforming to the imperative in Article II, Section 3, Clause 1, of the Constitution, that the chief executive “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.” But — he was also opening his 2024 campaign.
What went unremarked upon is that Sanders, only a month in office after two years as Donald J. Trump’s White House second press secretary, previewed the stump speech that Republicans will be offering in the 2024 campaign. Following a tradition begun in 1966 by Sen. Everett M. Dirksen and Rep. Gerald R. Ford, Sanders countered Biden — perhaps not point
by point, but surely theme by theme.
It was all there, the entire campaign in about two hours of television viewing:
The old guy (80 years old) facing questions about coherence and competence from a young figure (40 years old). The voice of experience countered by the voice of a new generation. Pleas for comity in full opposition to blasts of criticism. Displays of hokum versus expressions of outrage. The effort to regain the support of blue-collar voters against the drive to consolidate the newly gained support of manufacturing and mining workers.
There, months of campaigning in about two hours, including the slogan each party will sling against the other: You’re nuts and your supporters are dangerous.
The difference between the State of the Union message of President Lyndon Johnson and the response by the two Republican leaders nearly six decades ago speaks loudly about the change in American politics since then. Johnson spoke 14 months after winning what was at the time the greatest landslide in American history. Much of his message was indicative of the American preoccupation with the still-escalating war in Vietnam. Only hours before the president spoke, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara announced he was seeking 113,000 new recruits for the nation’s military services.
In that context, the 36th president argued that “this Nation is mighty enough, its society is healthy enough, its people are strong enough, to pursue our goals in the rest of the world while still building a Great Society here at home.” The 46th president spoke bravely about his plans on the environment and tax justice but could offer no analog to Johnson’s bold pleas for new health and welfare legislation, his War on Poverty and a new offensive of foreign aid — when was the last time you heard that phrase? — “to make a maximum attack on hunger and disease and ignorance.”
The Republicans took the traditional course of urging government restraint, with Ford — who would have guessed he was nine years from delivering his own State of the Union address? — pleading for “liberating the War on Poverty from waste, controversy and the bad odor of political bossism.”
The contrast between that time, of war and slowly gathering dissent (with inflation on the way), and our time, of relative peace and raging dissent (and inflation at more than double the 1966 rate) is jarring: No lawmakers shouting that the president was a “liar.” No lack of confidence in American will (Dirksen said to “retreat and get out [from Vietnam] would be deemed a confession that we are a paper tiger.”) No need to assure the country that its democracy was robust and healthy.
Calling the president a liar, and watching the president beg for bipartisanship, and seeing one-half of the House chamber stand in rousing applause and watching the other half sit on its hands is what the 2024 presidential election will be about.
Biden set forth his agenda — more spending for climate change, boosting taxes for the wealthy, banning assault weapons, attacking Big Pharma profits. His speechwriters need not conjure fresh speeches for the campaign. He already has an ample one.
Sanders set out the Republican campaign themes — that Biden is “unfit to serve as commander in chief”; that Americans will resist further invasions of the “woke” into mainstream American life; that Republicans will fight “to prohibit indoctrination” in schools; and that there must be a frontal attack on the ideas of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party that she argued has co-opted the president. Republican candidates — whether Trump or the gaggle inching up to the starting line here in New Hampshire — don’t need a fresh script. Sanders already has one at hand.
Biden and Trump are both determined to run for second terms, impulses at odds with the wishes of their party and the public; only a third of Americans want either of them to run again, according to the latest YouGov poll.
But whoever enters the general election, the themes set out by Biden and Sanders will be the leitmotif of next winter’s primaries and caucuses. By November, we might even see Sanders on the Republican ticket. (She had the best campaign line of the night: “The dividing line in America is no longer right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”)
Whatever happens, let us recall what President Johnson said in that 1966 message: “In this work,” he said at a time of great American promise and challenge, “we plan to discharge our duty to the people whom we serve.”