Saul Loeb/Pool via AP
President Biden delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress, March 1, 2022.
Two months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, The Pittsburgh Courier—the newspaper for Pittsburgh’s Black community—said that people of conscience should be fighting for two victories: one, for democracies over the Nazis and the Japanese militarists, and two, for the extension of full democratic rights to African Americans. The campaign, dubbed the Double V campaign, was devised by Black leaders, most particularly A. Philip Randolph, to use Blacks’ commitment to democracy abroad to advance equal rights at home. By threatening a peaceful march on Washington of 100,000 Blacks, Randolph, the democratic socialist who headed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, persuaded President Roosevelt to order the desegregation of defense plants. (His further demand, for the desegregation of the armed forces, wasn’t met, but when he threatened another such march in 1948, President Truman ordered the military to desegregate.)
In his State of the Union address last night, President Biden spoke forcefully and effectively about the nation’s commitment to the ongoing fight for democracy over autocracy; in this case, of course, the fight against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric attempt to take over Ukraine. Later in his speech, in the course of basically restating much of his first-year agenda, Biden also spoke, if briefly, about the need to pass legislation to promote voting rights for all Americans.
Someone in his speechwriters’ shop should have dug up and read that 80-year-old Pittsburgh Courier editorial. Someone could have suggested that the president note that threats to the democratic order weren’t limited to the Russian tanks surrounding Kyiv, but that here at home, they were surging in Republican-controlled states that sought to keep Americans from voting, because Republicans feared the voters they singled out wouldn’t vote for them. Someone might have suggested that he mention the insurrection that had caused Congress to flee from its chambers just 14 months ago, or that until this past weekend, too many prominent Americans defended Putin for his tough, autocratic, and homophobic ways while attacking Ukrainian President Zelensky as an ineffectual small-d democrat.
But that wasn’t Biden. I suppose he thought that affirming our newfound national unity, at least on one issue, was more important than pointing out that democracy is embattled here at home, and calling out, if not by name, those prominent Americans who threaten it.
It’s not as if this would have changed Republicans’ votes on the voting rights legislation they have already rejected. But it would have been an accurate and politically necessary interjection—alienating the already alienated Republicans, to be sure, but rousing a Democratic base that currently is visibly unroused.
Much of the speech, after all, was devoted to emphasizing just how unpolarizing the real Joe Biden actually is. No, he never supported defunding the police, he wants them both funded and better trained (however inadequate that training may be to the task of deracializing policing). No, he won’t insist on mask or vaccine mandates now that the omicron strain has largely subsided, though he will build a storehouse of masks and vaccines and treatments should another strain emerge.
Much of the speech was devoted to reiterating the particulars that had made up the Build Back Better bill. What Biden didn’t do, at least to my hearing, was sufficiently single out those particulars that still may have a bare chance of passing, like authorizing Medicare to bargain drug prices down, funding affordable child care and universal pre-K, and spending funds to mitigate the climate crisis. He made an acceptable case for all of these (particularly reducing the sticker price of insulin), but didn’t really distinguish between those BBB elements that were dead as doornails and those that still could pass. It’s possible, of course, that he believes none of them will pass, which begs the question of why he spent so much valuable time on it.
Someone could have suggested that the president note that threats to the democratic order weren’t limited to the Russian tanks surrounding Kyiv.
Besides his discussion of Ukraine and the battle for democracy, the only other part of his speech that wasn’t part of last year’s menu at Chez Joe was his discussion of inflation, both the causes of and remedies for. That opened the opportunity for him to tally the toll that offshoring manufacturing has taken on the Midwest and elsewhere, and to call on Congress to complete what really is a domestic manufacturing bill, which each house has already passed in substantially different versions. As someone who, as a senator, supported such misguided treaties as NAFTA and PNTR (which allowed and even encouraged American manufacturers to relocate their plants to China), Biden is not the man to tell the tale of how we deindustrialized; that task is left to Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders. But Biden is every bit as bullish on reviving American manufacturing with industrial policy as Brown and Bernie are, and on this battlefield, he can win back at least some—probably not many, but some—of the working-class voters who have drifted to the Republicans.
He also put forth a Prospect-like case, to coin a phrase, against monopolies that have been raising prices up the wazoo in the absence of competition. He singled out, as we have, such monopolized industries as ocean shipping and meat processing. Perhaps the threat of antitrust lawsuits and new regulatory standards can bring down prices in these industries, but whether they can promptly enough to affect November’s election is highly doubtful, though the long-term benefits of such policies will likely be substantial.
In short, the message Biden sought to convey was something that’s been so apparent all along you can almost hear it in his cadence: Look, guys, I’m not into the culture wars, I just want to rebuild the economy so it’s less dependent on foreign nations and can benefit not just the rich but ordinary Americans.
There’s been precious little in Biden’s first year as president that should have been interpreted otherwise. But Republicans’ electoral prospects depend on projecting onto Biden an identity that is the precise opposite of his actual one, and such self-proclaimed “centrist Democrats” as the Manchin-Gottheimer gang have often bought into this deliberate distortion as well. (It’s noteworthy that Bernie and the Squad, like Biden, steer largely clear of culture-war issues and focus on a popular economic agenda, too, though they are automatically reviled by both the Republicans and the centrists as the personifications of policies they don’t, in fact, embrace.)
I doubt last night’s speech will in itself change many minds about Biden or his fellow Democrats; it will have to be accompanied by legislative battles for the most popular elements of their agenda, by dramatizations and reiterations of their actual stances, and by a return to a post-pandemic near-normality and the reduction of inflation—those last two elements being both the most important and the ones over which the Democrats (or anybody) have the least control. Biden can make some political gains, if modest, for his very successful work building a global anti-Putin coalition. He’s still in need of some version of a Double V campaign if he’s to really rally his anti-Trumpian base.
