What a state (of the Union) we're in, by J.L. Reiter
Article II, Section 3 says that the U.S. 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…”
In the television age, the state of the union address (SOTU) is an opportunity for a sitting president to boast of his alleged achievements, run policy ideas up the flagpole to see who salutes, and bask in the adulation of about one half his audience. No one likes it. Listening to it is a bore not just because of the endless policy talking points, but because the president’s side is compelled to applaud, often leaping to their feet, after each bullet point on the teleprompter ends in “[applause].”
Because the address features the president, head of the executive branch of government, being invited into the chamber of the House of Representatives, the legislative branch, there is a certain level of decorum involved. The speech is preceded by the president being formally invited into the chamber, then walking slowly down the line of elected officials, Supreme Court justices, and other notables to shake hands and exchange pleasantries.
Biden got off to a good start by congratulating the 118th Congress on its election and shaking the hand of Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Then he interrogated the twin teleprompters with a vengeance, moving from one to the other like they were Scylla and Charybdis, each to be kept a close eye on but not for too long at a time.
Biden’s delivery is bizarre. Go back and look at some of his earlier (like, in terms of decades) speeches on YouTube. He was never particularly eloquent, but lately his diction and enunciation has collapsed, and he seems in a terrible hurry to get it all said before whatever medication is amping up his metabolism wears off. Somewhere on a shelf in a White House bathroom, there is a bottle of prescription pills that has one of those tiny, folded-up warning labels that unfurls to the size of a table cloth and lists all possible side-effects. One of these will warn “may cause blurred vision, slurring of words, and random outbursts of anger.”
Biden squinted all the time, as if he was looking for the hot dog vendor in a crowded stadium and had left his sunglasses in the car. He ran sentences together and slurred words to the point where you wanted subtitles. Several times, I had to wait for Twitter to tell me what he’d actually said (probably from journalists who had a copy of the speech). His lips move up and down in parallel, like a puppet’s, as if some facial muscles necessary for speech got botoxed in collateral damage.
And boy, was he angry. About what, it’s hard to say. It just looked like that random, old guy kind of anger that does not seem to correspond to the importance of a given subject. At one point, he went off script to talk about Xi Xinping, asking “Name me one!” (three times, jabbing his finger) “world leader who would switch places with Xi.” I would think some leaders of bankrupt, tinpot countries wouldn’t mind being the unquestioned autocrat of the world’s second most powerful country, but apparently Joe thought that was a good time to go off script.
Like Trump, every time Joe goes off script, your sphincter clenches and you wait for the clunker. But there weren’t any major ones on Tuesday. He did sprinkle in the usual Biden folksy interjections, “no joke... I mean it... think about it... look, folks...here's the deal!” But though these ad libs cheapened a speech that took a team of experts hundreds of hours to write, they didn’t ruin it.
Congressman Joe Wilson broke the taboo on heckling by shouting “you lie!” during Obama’s 2009 SOTU, and now the opposition’s response is not constrained to just not clapping, staying seated, and rolling eyes. Marjorie Taylor Greene got the camera-ready “you lie” moment this year, helped by a striking white winter coat. Republicans shouted out in spontaneous anger when Biden suggested that certain unnamed members of their party wanted to gut social security and Medicare, or as he says it, “soshscurtynmedker.”
Biden made all sorts of claims that can be fact-checked at your favorite news site. Here’s a fairly typical one: he claimed to have created 12 million “new jobs,” but only 2.7 million of them were actually new – the rest simply replaced jobs lost to Covid. He tried to put a positive spin on inflation. He went into a list of policy issues which seemed bush-league rather than SOTU-level stuff - lead in pipes in schools, capping prices on the insulin, and the apparent crisis of burger-joint workers being constrained by non-compete clauses.
Biden streamed out the usual laundry list of expensive social welfare programs that we’re not paying for even now, let alone able to expand. He gave less than a minute to the border crisis, which I would too if I’d allowed 5 million people to attempt illegal entry into the U.S. and had created bogus parole programs to entice millions more.
He promised to end cancer as we know it, something he did not achieve when as Obama’s vice president he was in charge of the cancer “moon shot.”
He urged Congress to “do something” about “gun violence,” alluding to plans that stand no chance of either passing into law, let alone lowering the number of people who shoot other people in America, usually with hand guns.
Biden asked Congress to restore the “right that was taken away” when the Supreme Court overthrew Roe v. Wade last year, though the court had ruled, correctly, that there was no constitutional right to an abortion and that the 50 states would have to work it out themselves per the 10th amendment.
He urged passage of the so-called “Equality Act,” and continued his administration’s obsession with a dangerous gender ideology that is starting to unravel as evidence mounts of harm done to vulnerable children by complicit, Munchausen-by-proxy adults and profit-seeking quacks.
Of course, he had to talk about January 6th, the day worse than Pearl Harbor or 9-11 or anything else since the Civil War, when Democracy was “threatened and attacked.” This gave rise to his least credible claim of all, that the leftist/anarchist Canadian illegal immigrant who attacked Paul Pelosi in San Francisco a few weeks ago was "unhinged by the Big Lie" (that Trump really won in 2020) and was inspired by the same rhetoric as the Capitol rioters. He ludicrously called the assault on Pelosi, by an incoherent hammer-wielding psycho, “political violence.”
The Left-wing media, which is to say nearly all of them, thought it was a fantastic SOTU. CNN’s Wollf Blitzer said it was Biden’s best speech ever. The much smaller right-of-center media concentrated their fire on the inaccuracy of Biden’s claims and his terrible delivery.
Democrats and their leftist media allies must be relieved it went so well but worried how long the show can go on. Remember, Biden was born closer to Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 inauguration than his own in 2020. That is to say, the guy is old. Some guys are sharp into their 80s and even 90s. But not many. And not Joe. He is gradually and visibly declining in physical strength and mental acuity, and the idea of him running again in 2024 is staggering. Still, given the alternatives (Kamala? Pete? Gavin?) the Democrats may have no choice. Republicans meanwhile, who should be able to cake-walk this one home in 2024, face an unrelenting, immovable object in Donald Trump, who is unlikely to win if nominated and if not, might torpedo their primary winner with a third-party run like Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 or Ross Perot in 1992.
So the state of the union is, in a word, divided. Whether it can stand remains to be seen.