Shawn Thew/Pool Photo via AP
Biden went straight at MAGA at the beginning of his address to Congress.
The news isn’t that President Biden delivered a combative State of the Union address. Given the political climate, given what the Republican Party has become and what a Donald Trump victory in November would do to the nation, a combative speech was absolutely necessary and a foregone conclusion. The real news was how finely targeted Biden’s attacks turned out to be, and how well he delivered them.
He went straight for the MAGA idiocies that most Americans reject. He went straight for the billionaires and corporations that avoid taxes and make the nation unable to meet its most basic needs. He went straight for those, like Donald Trump, who threaten American democracy. Lest there were any doubt, that is how he means to run.
In a sense, the questions he posed to the public asked: “Which side are you on?” Most presidents have shunned posing that question, as the threats confronting the nation have seldom compelled them to pose it. Lincoln had to pose it, as did Franklin Roosevelt, defending his partial redistribution of power from a wealthy establishment to a broader public. Biden’s speech built on both those precedents (and both those presidents). He began, in fact, by quoting FDR’s 1941 State of the Union, when most of Europe had fallen to Hitler while America was still nervously at peace, in which Roosevelt, noting the unprecedented threat to democracy, said it was “no ordinary time.”
That dangerous time, that threat to democracy, Biden began, was with us again, from sources both foreign, as Roosevelt had noted, and domestic, as Lincoln had explained. He then segued into his which-side-are-you-ons. For or against Putin? (Noting that Trump’s answer was, more or less, for Putin.) For or against Russia’s threat to Europe? For or against the January 6th insurrectionists, and for or against the use of violence in American politics? For or against a woman’s right to choose? “My predecessor” is on one side, Biden repeatedly said (Trump having provided the requisite quotes); I’m on the other. Those are the very questions on which he could be sure most Americans came down on the same side that he did.
Part two of the Biden List of Contrasts centered on his “middle-out, bottom-up, not top-down economics,” as he put it. There, he cited his legislation that empowered Medicare to bargain down the prices of ten drugs and pledged to expand that list to 500 drugs over the next decade. He vowed to extend the $2,000 limit on yearly drug payments from Medicare recipients to all Americans. He noted Trump’s determination to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and his own commitment to restore the Child Tax Credit and establish universal pre-K for three- and four-year-olds.
These priorities will be funded, he fairly shouted (as he did much of his speech), by fairly taxing the rich. Biden is not Roosevelt; he did not declare, as Roosevelt dared to do, that he “welcomed their hatred.” But after noting that the thousand billionaires who blight the American landscape pay an average of 8.2 percent on their yearly income, he called for imposing a minimum tax on them of 25 percent, and raising the corporate minimum tax to 21 percent. He toyed with the Republicans in the house, asking if they’d support another $2 trillion cut to the wealthiest Americans’ taxes, as they did when Trump was president. Indeed, he toyed with them repeatedly, chiding them for rejecting the border security bill they had drafted with their Democratic colleagues before Trump told them to kill it. “We can fight about fixing the border, or we can fix it,” he said.
Not since Roosevelt and Truman has a Democratic president, or presidential nominee, run on progressive populist economics; Biden is plainly doing that now. Raising taxes on the rich—who are a lot richer now than they’ve ever been—and using those funds to make child care and education more affordable are policies that poll exceedingly well these days. Unions are more popular and necessary today than they’ve been in many decades, too; and, again, you have to go back to Truman to find a president (or Democratic presidential nominee) arguing for the necessity of strong unions as Biden does. Roosevelt and Truman presided at a time before the effects of New Deal economics had fully taken effect, before the widely shared prosperity of the postwar decades had built the world’s first middle-class majority. Biden governs at a time when decades of bad policy crafted by both parties have created the world’s first post–middle class majority, and the public is on his side when he vows to enact the policies—domestic manufacturing, higher wages, family support, progressive taxes—that would restore mass prosperity.
But Biden had to do more in this speech than make clear that he was on the public’s side and that Republicans, not to mention Trump, were not when it came to the most fundamental issues confronting the nation. He obviously had to deal with the age issue, in all its various facets. He dispelled, I think, the accusation of lack of energy, not least by virtually shouting at least half of his address. This was a departure from past State of the Union practice, but given his age, a necessary one. He had to deal with the alertness issue, which he at least partially dispelled by playing with his Republican interrupters, even if his comebacks and taunting had clearly been rehearsed. Yes, words were slurred and misspoken; that’s an artifact of age he clearly won’t dispel. Republicans will continue to highlight that, though if Biden takes to the stump with the energy and the messages he displayed Thursday night, those where-did-they-come-from nouns should matter less to at least a portion of the public.
Whether all this will suffice to lift Biden out of the hole in which he enters his contest with Trump is, of course, impossible to say. There’s no doubt that the speech will quell most Democratic anxiety over Biden’s ability to take the fight to Trump, which is the sine qua non of any Democratic victory. The contrasts he repeatedly made between his positions and Trump’s could swing some swing voters and also prompt some younger and minority voters to return to the fold, if any messaging can reach them at all.
That may be one reason why Biden shouted, but he also had a pretty good rejoinder to the argument that he was too old. It was Trump, he said, who was the candidate of humankind’s oldest, most primitive instincts. “Hate, anger, and retribution,” Biden said, make up the platform on which Trump is seeking office. That’s a pretty fair attack, in both senses of “pretty fair”: it’s accurate, and it’s effective. Biden needs to keep at it, and we have to hope it works.
