Eight Thoughts on the State of the Union

Quite a good speech that addressed several of the president's political problems — but not his biggest one.

Dear readers,

Well, that was quite a speech! Here are my takeaways on President Biden’s feisty, high-energy, partisan performance last night.

1. This speech will quiet a lot of the worry among Democratic partisans that Biden is too old to be an effective candidate. The president put on a strong and energetic performance: emotive, empathetic, pissed off about the right things. While he was mostly reading from a teleprompter, some of the best moments of the speech were off-the-cuff and interactive — ribbing Republicans for not wanting to talk about their own agenda and even drawing a specific laugh out of Sen. Lindsey Graham. He had occasional mumbles and malapropisms — most notably referring to Laken Riley as “Lincoln Riley” — but then, it’s not like his opponent is a super crisp speaker either. The bar he needed to clear here was very low — he needed to show he’s adequately sharp, like he was when he won in 2020 — and he achieved it.

2. Since Biden is an effective advocate for himself, he should get out there more. I think the White House has already learned this lesson; for example, he went on “Late Night with Seth Meyers” last week and will be interviewed on Jonathan Capehart’s MSNBC show tomorrow. Nate Silver says he needs to get out more in challenging, adversarial settings, but I disagree — as a news consumer, I like to see hard-hitting interviews, but if Biden’s objective is to show wary voters that he’s still likable, in-charge, and mentally with it, he’ll probably produce his most effective performances in relatively easy settings. In fact, since Biden’s main polling problems are with less-engaged voters, the best opportunities to reach them probably come from places other than hard-hitting news shows. This is part of why it was so puzzling that Biden passed up the traditional pre-Super Bowl TV interview: that was a great opportunity to get the president in front of persuadable voters who will never watch “Meet the Press.”

3. Biden shored up his position with the media. Ducking the Super Bowl interview is one of those stories that regular voters will never care about, but journalists have thought a lot about. We found his choice to pass up the interview to be weird and suspicious. Has Biden really gotten so bad that he can’t handle an interview opportunity like that? Is he actually significantly declining? His choice to skip the interview compounded the effect of Robert Hur’s report and made reporters second-guess themselves about whether they’d given his advanced age enough attention in their coverage. Putting out effective public performances like this one sends a good message to the public, but it also makes reporters more inclined to believe the president is compos mentis, which in turn shapes their coverage in a favorable direction.

   

   President Joe Biden delivers the annual State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the Capitol on March 7, 2024 in Washington, DC. This is Biden's final address before the November general election. (Photo by Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

4. He still has not made a great case to swing voters that he is effective. While the speech was an effective rejoinder to the idea that Biden is literally too old to do his job, I continue to believe that “too old” is mostly a placeholder for voter concerns that the president and his administration are ineffectual. Voters see that bad things happen (inflation, the migrant surge, war in Gaza) and that Biden fails to sufficiently quell them. I still think the president’s most important weakness in this area is on the economy. Immigration is now the issue voters are most likely to cite as the most important problem facing the country, but the voters who say that are disproportionately Republican partisans who would never vote for Biden anyway; for persuadable voters, inflation and the economy remain the top cited problems. And while inflation has come down, high interest rates have limited the extent to which consumers are actually experiencing moderated inflation as improved purchasing power. Perhaps voter sentiment will improve through the year as interest rates fall, as Biden predicted they would in his speech. But ultimately, this is not a messaging problem — the problem is that conditions in the country are actually unsatisfactory in key ways right now, and Biden needs to get those conditions to change.

5. He did effectively attack his opponent. Or, as he referred to him repeatedly, his “predecessor.” Trump remains unpopular, his lack of respect for democratic institutions is unpopular, the Republican agendas on abortion and health care are unpopular, and Biden effectively made all these points. Biden’s best hope of winning re-election is convincing enough voters who dislike both him and Trump that Trump is the more unacceptable candidate, and he has a lot of material to make that case. If he didn’t have as much fodder, this race wouldn’t be as close as it is — Biden would be trailing badly like Justin Trudeau, Rishi Sunak, and many other world leaders who are also unpopular due to inflation and migration, and who face opponents who aren’t so flamboyantly dislikable and criminal as Trump.

6. On immigration, Biden addressed a bad issue as best he could. The bipartisan immigration bill is popular, and Biden worked hard to get out the message that Republicans helped make it, only to kill it because they care more about having the border as a campaign talking point than actually fixing it. When Biden talked about the ways the bill would ameliorate the situation at the border if only Republicans would agree to vote on it, Republican Sen. James Lankford could be seen mouthing “that’s true.” Still, it’s never great to have to be explaining why you, the president, are not responsible for policy outcomes in Washington. And Biden does bear responsibility along with Republicans: while he’s trying to do the right things now, his hasty actions at the start of his term to reverse Trump-era migration policies both encouraged migrants to come to the US and made it harder to keep them out when they got to the border, and then he waited too long to focus on fixing the problem he had exacerbated. That’s why he’s in damage-control mode on the issue.

7. Let Biden be Biden. Challenged by Marjorie Taylor Greene to say the name of Laken Riley — the murdered University of Georgia student whose alleged killer is an illegal immigrant from Venezuela — Biden did, sort of, referring to “Lincoln Riley, an innocent young woman killed by an illegal.” This remark led to predictable reproach from the terminally woke wing of the Democratic Party — “no human being is illegal,” tutted Rep. Delia Ramirez of Chicago, demanding that the president speak more politely of an alleged murderer — but it’s good for Biden to use normal, plain language instead of euphemisms like “undocumented.” For too long, Democrats have treated illegal immigrants like a political constituency, even though they are not citizens, do not vote, and are not even supposed to be here. The huge wave of illegal migration over the last couple of years has tried voters’ patience all over the country — the level of expense that New York City is now incurring to address problems that properly belong to Venezuela is ridiculous — and Biden seems to understand that Democrats need a message that is clear about illegal immigration being a bad thing. But I’m actually glad these members of Congress are giving Biden flak: one of the best things he can do to demonstrate that he’s moved toward the center and toward voters’ preferences on immigration is to get people on the left wing of his party to criticize him.

8. What the hell was going on with Sen. Katie Britt? I had to check Wikipedia to see if she was a theater kid in high school, and it doesn’t look like she was, but her SOTU response performance — it really was a performance — had the vibe of a rejected audition for a Hallmark Channel melodrama. Maybe she will become a camp icon. I doubt she will become vice president.

Very seriously,

Josh