POLITICS
Opinion | A Tale of Two Speeches in Biden’s State
of the Union
The president was on the offensive when vowing to
confront Putin — and on the backfoot when touting his domestic agenda.
Opinion by
JEFF GREENFIELD
03/01/2022
11:48 PM EST
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/03/01/biden-state-of-the-union-00013088
Jeff
Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.
The Joe
Biden who began his first State of the Union speech Tuesday night was someone
we have not seen very much of: a passionate, strong-voiced speaker, seeking a
united, free world and hailing his administration’s response to Vladimir
Putin’s aggression.
“I spent
countless hours unifying our European allies,” the president noted. “We shared
with the world in advance what we knew Putin was planning and precisely how he
would try to falsely justify his aggression.”
And while
Biden’s adversaries will gleefully note his unintentional substitution of
“Iranian” for “Ukrainian” people, his most notable ad lib came after he
skewered Putin, saying, “We countered Russia’s lies with truth and now that he
has acted, the free world is holding him accountable.”
And as the
chamber cheered, Biden added: “He has no idea what’s coming.”
Given the
grim nature of the topic, it may seem odd to note that this was the “easy” part
of the speech. Condemning an invasion that has had everyone from Tucker Carlson
to Bernie Sanders rallying behind Ukraine’s cause — with Carlson frantically
backpedaling like a center fielder who has misjudged a fly ball — is going to
trigger unanimity; especially when martial rhetoric is accompanied by decisive
acts that have put the whole democratic world in the same corner.
But when
the speech turned to matters at home, it was very much a mixed bag for Biden.
At times, his delivery was rapid, almost rushing. The inevitably undramatic
sections of a State of the Union speech — arguing for the passage of a grab bag
of legislative proposals unfamiliar to most of the audience, and whose
prospects range from slim to none — all but guarantee a sense of anticlimax,
compared to the ringing defense of a free nation and its people under attack.
His promise to combat inflation by buying American products and cracking down
on price-gouging is as unlikely to persuade disaffected citizens as
(semi-justifiably) blaming Covid-fueled supply chain problems.
And while
Biden was right to point to the success of the American Rescue Plan in easing
the worst economic effects of the pandemic, those words might as well have been
shouted down along with the other outburst in the Capitol, given the collective
amnesia that has gripped most Americans. (A new poll shows a thumping majority
believes that jobs have been lost over the last year, although the numbers show
jobs were added at a record pace.)
It was
possible to hear in some of Biden’s words arguments that might — might — offer
Democrats some footing for a midterm battle they’re currently losing. They
largely consist of defining the bad guys.
First, Big
Pharma.
The story
of Joshua Davis, a 13-year-old with Type 1 diabetes, was affecting. And calling
out companies who slapped a 300 percent markup on insulin has resonance. It is
one issue where Republicans are almost all on the “wrong” side of the debate.
Second, Big
Tech.
“As Frances
Haugen, who is here with us tonight, has shown, we must hold social media
platforms accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our
children for profit,” Biden said. “It’s time to strengthen privacy protections,
ban targeted advertising to children, demand tech companies stop collecting
personal data on our children.”
This is an
issue where conservative Republicans and progressive Democrats are on the same
side, if for different reasons. (Progressives distrust the tech giants’ size;
conservatives think they are pumping leftist dogma into the ether.)
Third,
criminals.
“The answer
[to crime] is not to defund the police,” Biden said. “The answer is to fund the
police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”
The Republican members of Congress were on their feet before Biden got to the
end of that sentence, and it’s a fair bet that a legion of Democratic political
consultants were cheering, too.
In the run
up to the speech, I wondered whether it would be a good idea for Biden to throw
out the rule book on State of the Union addresses and talk solely about the
threat to democracy — not just in Ukraine, but around the world and here at
home.
He was,
after all, speaking in the chamber where an insurrectionist mob tried to
overturn an election, a chamber whose ranks included two sitting members of Congress
who had recently spoken to a neo-Nazi racist hate group, and where a majority
of the opposition party seems determined to undermine the electoral process.
After listening to the two very different tones of the speech, I still think
that would have been the better, if riskier, course.
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