The Hidden Messaging and Concocted Narratives in Biden’s SOTU

While the annual State of the Union address always draws expansive press coverage focused on one or more large themes, there are usually underlying, nuanced, embedded messages that mostly get overlooked. And that certainly was the case with Joe Biden’s SOTU Tuesday evening, but you had to listen intently to detect his concocted narratives and hidden messaging.

Among the false lines of attack that were breathtakingly dishonest and/or flew under the radar in his speech, he insulted the intelligence of the American people with a feeble attempt to use an obscure statistic as proof that his administration has done everything in its power to stop the epidemic of fentanyl addiction – after reversing dozens of Trump border policies, opening the floodgates to record waves of illegal immigrants and drug traffickers. As he prepares to announce his campaign for a second term in the Oval Office, he tried to take credit for historic employment growth, on the strength of millions and millions of jobs lost in the pandemic that have been regained simply as a result of a return to normalcy. He tried to connect the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the former Speaker of the House, to January 6 – a subject he is sure to cultivate in his forthcoming re-election campaign. And most insultingly, buried deep in a sentence few seemed to notice, he blamed the brutal siege on urban America by BLM-inspired radicals in 2020 on the pandemic, instead of the real cause: the cultural marxism unleashed and embraced by the Democratic Party following the George Floyd affair.

SOTU: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

Meanwhile, we were all treated to yet another rendition of the hackneyed and endlessly infuriating cliche about the rich needing to pay their “fair share,” a perpetually undefined number used as a cost-free cudgel in the left’s ongoing class warfare. Likewise, Biden attacked the easiest target in the world, “wealthy tax cheats” – those people taking full advantage of tax laws designed by politicians like Biden, and now attacked by this president as if it were the GOP, and not Democrats, who pounce on every opportunity to raise taxes. Projection, thy name is Democrats. And by the way, at some point, Joe needs to have mercy on us and stop telling that entirely uninteresting story about his father, a man of no known distinction, lecturing him on the dignity of work, as if that were some sort of revelation to the rest of us.

Only a career politician who has told so many half-truths and lies and drunk from the swamp for half a century would claim, to widespread laughter in the House chamber, that we will need oil “for at least another decade,” a shameless bow to the environmental extremists controlling policy in his administration, but deeply puzzling to any person with even half a brain who realizes a fully green economy will not happen for decades or centuries, if ever.

There was also the ongoing backdrop of the somnambulistic Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) battling sleep, or perhaps boredom – his eyes even shutting for a moment – as if he had taken a medication opposite to what the relatively alert president might have ingested. It was also notable how unconvinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared when Biden claimed, as House Republicans dig deep into his family’s seedy ties to the CCP, that he is being really tough on China and its military expansionism.

Biden set up and knocked down straw men as he hit every easy target for demagoguery, including the pharmaceutical companies and the heartless GOP trying to shut down Social Security and Medicare. Yes sir, he will promise to veto any attempt to end these entitlement programs, just like he will do to a federal abortion ban. Of course, neither is going to happen, but it made for a couple of pandering applause lines. And that wasn’t all in his arsenal. His virtue-signaling included lip service to the tired talking points on the left about “comprehensive immigration reform” and a ban on “assault weapons.”

But it’s also notable that the underlying tone of the speech revealed the continuing influence of Donald Trump on the national consciousness. Even as the sworn enemy of Trump and his supporters, Biden spoke of Americana - especially about manufacturing jobs - in a way one might have expected from his predecessor – and which we never heard from Barack Obama. As he prepares to announce his re-election campaign in the days ahead, the man from Scranton is clearly attempting to steal that valuable, made-in-the-USA, quasi-America First narrative from the GOP. He will need a lot more than luck for that one to pass the laugh test.

All in all, it is hard to argue that this 46th president who intends to seek a second term was either helped or hindered by his speech to the nation. His friends and foes remain unmoved. We did see the broad contours of his upcoming campaign, albeit in so many different directions that a central theme was difficult to decipher. But if Republicans intend to take back the White House, naming and shaming their likely opponent for the transparent lies, demagoguery and projection revealed in his SOTU address would likely be a good place to start.