It was President Biden’s first address to Congress since Republicans won control of the House, and, unofficially, the start of his 2024 re-election campaign. Biden faced a newly adversarial audience at his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, a group of empowered Republicans clustered on the right side of the House chamber, each one eager to perform outrage for the cameras.
The speech, a strictly choreographed bit of political theater, was as much a competition of affective performance between the president and his Republican rivals as it was a set of policy proposals. Mostly, Biden won. The Republicans heckled and booed. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the QAnon conspiracist from Georgia, bellowed at Biden in a big, fluffy fur coat, like Cruella De Vil; Kevin McCarthy, newly elected speaker after a long and humiliating Republican leadership contest, sulked pointedly in a chair behind the president. But Biden countered their flustered outrage with a cool, almost irreverent indifference.
Only once did he seem to lose control of the room, at a moment in his remarks on the debt ceiling where he accused the Republicans, accurately, of holding the national economy hostage in order to secure unpopular cuts to social security and Medicare. The Republicans booed and jeered mightily at this accusation; they would do no such thing, they implied. Flustered, Biden needed a moment to collect himself. But then he turned their denial into a bargaining chip. So were they saying that they would take social security and Medicare off the table in the coming debt ceiling negotiations? There was jeering, cheers – the Republicans seemed divided and confused. It was that rarest of events in a State of the Union speech: an exchange that could, conceivably, actually affect policy.
But for the most part, Biden’s speech was a tour of his economic achievements, a sort of pep-rally review of everything he had accomplished in his first two years in office, while his party controlled Congress. He touted better-than-expected jobs numbers and historically low unemployment; he touted his legislation that fosters competition with China in the manufacturing of semiconductor chips, and he announced a new rule requiring all federal construction projects to use American-made materials.
He bragged about a deal to cap insulin prices for Medicare patients, and called on Congress to make the cap universal. He bragged about his Inflation Reduction Act, and its climate investments in clean energy and natural disaster preparedness. The president tried to thread a delicate needle, arguing both that he had been tremendously successful and effective, and also that there was still more to be done. The refrain of the speech, repeated every few paragraphs like a prayer, distilled his case for re-election in the anodyne, pithy language of a bumper sticker: “Let’s get the job done.”
Repeatedly, Biden spoke not just of the surprisingly robust economy, but of the kind of lives Americans aspire to achieve within it. The theme was job creation, but to Biden’s credit, he distinguished that not just any jobs will do; working people, he claimed, needed jobs with dignity.
Biden is not an eloquent speaker, and he lacks the penchant for soaring rhetoric and moral aspiration that defined the speeches of his one-time boss, Barack Obama. But on this point he made himself clear in unusually moving terms.
He spoke of his father, who told him that work was not just about money, but about self-respect. He highlighted a union construction worker who was in the audience as his guest, a woman who had worked for decades in a job that gave her a living wage and personal esteem. Work has become undignified for many Americans, pushed as the working class has been into service sector jobs that surveil workers, demand obsequiousness from them, damage their bodies, and don’t pay enough to live on. These people’s malaise and resentment, their sense that the future has been stolen from them, has shaped American political life for years now, and it was rare to see a politician of such great mainstream success dignifying these people with a sense of empathy and equality, appealing not to their most base angers but to their highest aspirations. “Jobs are coming back,” Biden said. “Pride is coming back.” This president is not a great speech-giver, but to some of us, this sounded like poetry.
The economy is Biden’s preferred ground, and the area in which he can most reasonably claim success. But Biden spoke at great length about his past accomplishments from his first two years in office in part because he is unlikely to achieve much else for the rest of his first term. The Republican-controlled House has already initiated a flurry of investigations against the president; their conspiracy-mongering and jockeying for attention is likely to consume much of the next two years.
And even the president’s past accomplishments can look meagre when you consider what he promised. Noticeably absent from Biden’s speech were any mentions of the universal childcare and pre-K plans that had been a cornerstone of his domestic agenda at the outset of his term – plans that were scuttled by opponents, and de-prioritized by the administration, in favor of more macho, politically palatable public infrastructure goods, like roads and bridges.
And there were elephants in the room. Several US supreme court justices were in attendance, including Jackson, Kagan, Roberts and, bizarrely, retired-but-still-alive Justices Anthony Kennedy and Steven Breyer. Their robed appearance lent a morbid futility to all Biden’s talk of his domestic agenda, as if the justices were a bunch of grim reapers: they served as a reminder that, no matter what Biden tries to do, the unelected, unaccountable court at One First Street will strike down anything they do not like.
Indeed, that court’s most memorable and impactful action, the elimination of the abortion right in last month’s Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, barely merited a mention in Biden’s speech. In the now almost eight months since the ruling, countless women have been endangered and insulted, their organs made not their own. Many have been placed in danger of death or disfigurement because of the Republican party’s fantasies about their bodies; all of them have suffered the harm of being made into second-class citizens, their lives and their health commandeered from them, as if they were not adults.
It was the outrage over this decision that delivered the Democratic party their unexpected and unearned good performance in the midterms. Biden devoted three sentences to it; his tirade against “junk fees” got 19. Biden was clearly launching his re-election campaign with the State of the Union. If he wishes to win it, he might want to pay more attention to female voters.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
