It is entirely possible that President Joe Biden has found a silver lining to Vladimir Putin’s brutal attempt to crush Ukraine’s independence, which must be quite an uncomfortable feeling for the commander-in-chief, who surely is taking no pleasure in the bloody war now being waged in the former Soviet republic. However, with everyone’s attention on Ukraine, Mr. Biden can eat up a large chunk of his State of the Union address on March 1 talking about Putin, rather than having to pretend everything on the home front is going swimmingly.
The White House has already set the stage for this grand distraction, with Press Secretary Jen Psaki telling ABC on Sunday:
"There's no question that, in the State of the Union, the American people and anybody watching around the world will hear the president talk about the efforts he has led over the past several months to build a global coalition to fight against the autocracy and the efforts of President Putin to invade a foreign country."
The State of the Union is…
Mostly, in recent decades – but not always – presidents declared that the state of the union is strong. Several previous presidents have used variations on the theme and, back in 1975, Gerald Ford told Congress, “The state of the union is not good.” Assuming Biden intends to be completely honest with the joint session of Congress he will address on Tuesday, and with the American people, one might predict he will not use the word “strong,” or will at least add some sort of caveat. The current state of the union is something other than strong.
There have been no highlights to Biden’s almost 13 months in the White House, but he is likely nevertheless to tout an improving economy and historic “job creation.” Of course, that latter achievement is little more than an illusion. Millions lost their jobs thanks to the disastrous response to the COVID-19 pandemic and later, still more were dismissed for declining vaccination. Claiming you created jobs as people return to the workplace is akin to taking a wrecking ball to a house and then crediting oneself with having produced a large pile of bricks. In reality, the U.S. is still not back to the level it was at before COVID-19 – either in terms of employment or the economy in general.
(Photo by Melina Mara-Pool/Getty Images)
Will Mr. Biden talk about the crisis on the southern border or explain the upside of allowing a record number of illegal aliens to enter the country – and then transport them to various cities across the U.S.? That is unlikely since it would take quite a feat of verbal jiu-jitsu to put any kind of positive spin on that situation. If he mentions crime at all, it is likely to be portrayed as strictly a state-level issue; his Department of Justice has better things to do, after all, such as prosecuting Jan. 6 protesters and hunting down parents who dared question what their children are being taught in America’s abysmal public schools.
More than anything, one should expect something resembling a Democratic Party campaign speech, since Biden cannot be unaware that his party is looking at a potentially massive defeat in this year’s midterm elections. That eventuality does not bode well for him personally, since a Republican House majority is certain to launch a slew of investigations targeting the administration.
What is the state of union? What will it be, according to Mr. Biden? Perhaps he will borrow from Bill Clinton, who in 1995 declared, “Our country is stronger than it was two years ago,” even though that would not be true. Maybe he will echo the man he served as vice president and declare, as Barack Obama did in 2012, that the state of the union is “getting stronger.” That’s a good way to hedge one’s bets, after all. If he were going for complete honesty, though, Biden would opt for the Gerald Ford version.
~ Read more from Graham J. Noble.
