US President Joe Biden has laid out his re-election pitch for 2024. He is offering green protectionism, welfare populism, careful language to try not to offend the American mainstream on values, while still doing plenty to keep the progressive activists and elites as part of his base.
By the standards of Biden speech making, it was a powerful and well delivered address. There were lots of elisions and factual massages that didn’t quite reflect reality, but it was the best speech Biden has delivered, and the best delivery by him, for many years.
After a little confusion at the start, Biden not only read the words effectively but even engaged in a little spontaneous response to a few Republican congressmen who engaged in some minor heckling.
Overall, the speech was Biden playing to his strengths.
Unemployment is low, he said. Black unemployment is at a record low. Under my administration we’ve created 12 million jobs. Inflation has peaked and is coming down.
This pitch may or may not work. Inflation is eating up the incomes of average Americans. There is substantial disguised and hidden unemployment. And even to get where America is now has involved the Biden administration spending trillions of dollars that the US Treasury just does not have.
Nonetheless, it’s absolutely right that Biden, if he wants another term, has to concentrate on the economic debate.
Free trade as an attractive political idea is clearly dead. Not only will the phrase “free trade” probably never pass a president’s lips again – or at least not in the foreseeable future – but every part of Biden’s macro pitch was about rehabilitating factories, mandating government to “buy American”, and bringing back the jobs that went overseas in part because of the effects of free trade.
Biden also doubled down on his climate change initiatives, trying to sell them as not only saving the planet but also boosting the US economy.
That’s plainly nonsense. The official Republican response to Biden, given by Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, focused on the cheap abundant energy that the US enjoyed when Biden came to office, and how his green policies had put that to an end.
Nonetheless, Biden was a lot less extreme green in this speech than in his last campaign. America would need oil and gas for years to come, he said.
It was overwhelmingly a domestically focused speech. Towards the end there were a few pro forma paragraphs denouncing Vladimir Putin and seven sentences saying the US was stronger than ever in its competition with China.
The only really nutty moment in the speech came when Biden declared that no leader in the world would want to change places with China’s Xi Jinping. And then repeated this perfectly dotty and meaningless formulation several times. But Biden’s spoken offerings have set such a high standard of eccentricity over the past two years that this passed substantially without notice.
There was no mention of AUKUS or Australia, of course, but Biden did repeat his important line about strengthening alliances.
He got the tone on police reform pretty much right. That sort of approach is why the Democratic Party largely thought last time that he had the best chance of defeating Donald Trump. Biden, unlike many Democrats, doesn’t go out of his way to offend Middle America. He didn’t denounce police. He praised the overwhelming majority of police who do the right thing and courageously put their lives on the line for public safety. Often times we ask too much of police, he rightly said.
But he also rightly said that when police break the public trust they too must be held accountable. That he had the full support of the parents of Tyre Nichols, so brutally killed by Memphis police after being pulled over for seemingly no reason, to do this, is a great strength for Biden.
But then he did a little dance on LGBTQ rights to keep progressives happy too, and another on abortion rights.
The bottom line is that most voters, even most Democrats, don’t want Biden to run again. He would be 86 at the end of a second term. Most Americans think their country is on the wrong track. His approval ratings languish in the low 40s. But he has been given a new lease of life by Democrats doing so well in last year’s midterm congressional elections, increasing their majority in the Senate and only just losing the House of Representatives. Vice President Kamala Harris has served her boss well by not being very good. No one is clamouring for Harris to take over. Under Biden’s direction the Democrats have changed the calendar of the primaries to put South Carolina first. That’s Biden’s strongest state. His black support in South Carolina revived his initially very poor showing in the primaries during the last presidential cycle.
Huckabee’s response showed where her party thinks Biden is vulnerable: cost of living, the end of cheap energy, the cost of the green measures, violent crime, the chaos at the southern border and the influx of illegal immigrants and drugs, and the whole woke madness of the left wing of the Democratic Party.
The State of the Union speech, Biden shaking hands with Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Republican response – it all represents something like a return to normality in American politics. Lots to disagree about, but all conducted within the normal rules and courtesies.
That may be the most encouraging aspect of this perfectly adequate speech by Biden.
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