Biden brought his A-game: But did the State of the Union turn the tide?

Last Thursday, Joe Biden went before Congress to deliver his State of the Union speech. To quote the legendary “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in the cult classic movie “They Live,” the president had to choose between kicking a*s and chewing bubble gum — and he was all out of bubble gum.

Biden presented the 2024 presidential election as a stark and clear choice between protecting American democracy or imperiling it by putting Donald Trump back in the White House, a man who has promised to be a dictator on “day one” of his return to the White House.

In perhaps Biden’s strongest moment, he described Trump as an insurrectionist, a likely traitor and an enemy of American democracy and freedom. The former president's coup attempt in January 2021 and his "plots to steal the election," Biden said, had "posed the gravest threat to our democracy since the Civil War":

But they failed. America stood strong and democracy prevailed. But we must be honest: The threat remains and democracy must be defended. My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of Jan. 6. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simplest truth. You can’t love your country only when you win.

Biden also identified the 2024 election as part of a larger global battle to defend democracy, saying that Ukraine’s fight against Russian invaders is central to America’s interests and to preventing a new era of Russian aggression against the West. In thrall to Donald Trump and enamored of autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, Republicans in Congress continue to block vital military assistance for Ukraine.

"Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today," Biden continued. "What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time."

Without mentioning Trump's name or his obsequious relationship with Putin, Biden said that a "former American president" had "bow[ed] down to a Russian leader. It’s outrageous. It’s dangerous. It’s unacceptable."

There were other important issues in the president's speech. He pledged to restore women's reproductive rights, expand the social safety net, continue to grow the American economy, confront corporate greed and force the richest Americans to pay their fair share of taxes. Biden also attempted to shame the Trump-controlled Republicans in Congress for refusing to pass a bipartisan bill to address the “border crisis.” Unfortunately, they are incapable of shame.

Biden concluded with bold rhetoric meant to push back against the narrative that he is too old to serve a second term, positioning himself instead as wise and battle-tested, with a hard-earned perspective on the American democratic experiment.

"My lifetime has taught me to embrace freedom and democracy," he said, "a future based on core values that have defined America: honesty, decency, dignity, equality, to respect everyone, to give everyone a fair shot, to give hate no safe harbor." 

As I've written previously, Biden’s speech amounted to one broadside after another fired at Trump and his Republican allies. Predictably, Trump took to Truth Social and tried to retaliate with weak and empty insults, even calling Biden a "psycho." By his usual standards of bluster and menace, it was a pathetic reaction. The GOP's official response came in an eerie Stepford Wife-style speech from Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, who was clearly out of her depth.

Reactions from the media were largely heartening. Jennifer Senior of the Atlantic described Biden’s speech as "stunning,"

and it wasn’t just because there was a game on quality to his remarks, the thwapping sound of a gauntlet hitting the ground. It’s because he managed to do that thing he does best, which his aides long ago described to Richard Ben Cramer in "What It Takes" as “the connect.” Biden’s primary strength has never been formulating policy or grand ideas. It’s been his ability to read a room, to sweep in the energy that’s already there, and to make the most impersonal settings feel deeply intimate, like one-on-one discussions. ... 

There was a call-and-response quality to the whole affair. In the after-chatter, the one spontaneous part of this ritual, Representative Gregory Meeks told Biden he was “a Baptist preacher tonight!” And Senator Raphael Warnock, an actual Baptist preacher, approvingly called it “a sermon.”

At Esquire, Charles Pierce summoned up an unforgettable description of Biden’s speech as a "First round knockout, delivered with the kind of 19th hole bonhomie that allows anyone to be in on the joke ... in vivid contrast to Speaker Mike Johnson, who was sitting behind the president and looked throughout like a man eating toads."

At his website Enough Already, D. Earl Stephens admitted that Biden had moved him to tears:

I cried not so much for the man, but for the moment the man was meeting.

— I cried because we’ve heard a lot of guff from a lot of people who want to remind us every other damn minute that the man is too old, and out of touch.

— I cried because we’ve heard a lot of outright crap that the man’s predecessor had all the momentum and was leading one stupid, meaningless political poll after another.

— I cried because we know in our hearts which man really has America’s best interests at heart .... 

— I cried because we know when it comes to preserving a woman’s right to choose what is best for HER, this man will be there for her, unlike his grabby, grotesque predecessor.

I cried, because FINALLY everybody in the world was about to hear from our side — the silent majority’s side.

And let me tell you this: The man positively delivered. I have watched too many big speeches in my lifetime, and I swear to God I have never seen anybody come right out of the chute and unequivocally say exactly what needed saying. ... [T]he Man from Scranton was clearly packing a punch.

Then we arrive at a more troublesome question: How did the American people at large respond to Biden’s speech?

An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that roughly three in 10 Americans said that Biden had "outperformed their expectations," slightly more than the number who said "he was in line with their expectations." But more than one-third of the Americans surveyed, including nearly half of those under age 30, "did not read, see, or hear about the address."

Biden’s State of the Union address provided a badly needed jolt of inspiration and energy to Democratic voters and other Americans who feel despair at the prospect of Trump's return to power, which has almost seemed like a fait accompli — and like a potential death sentence for our ailing democracy. But for all the positive emotions generated by last Thursday night's speech, we don't know much about its potential impact on voting and overall public opinion.

The president of the United States occupies a unique position in the world as head of state, chief executive and enforcement officer, and commander in chief of the most powerful military in the world. The president also serves as a symbolic leader, a cheerleader and caretaker of the national mood. But for all his power, the president is not a superhero with magical abilities to solve all the country’s problems — although too many members of the public seem to view the position in those childish terms.

One thing is clear: The presidency offers the ultimate bully pulpit, and the State of the Union is one of its showcase moments. Political scientists and other experts have repeatedly demonstrated that, for all its symbolic and performative power, the State of the Union address has little ability to decide a president’s political fortunes. It's basically an opportunity to claim credit, stake out a potential legislative agenda, mobilize and rally one’s supporters and perhaps win over new ones. But the speech itself does not generally have a significant impact on elections. Moreover, in our climate of partisan division the State of the Union is inevitably seen through a distorted lens, with each side interpreting it in terms most favorable to their perspective. 

Philip Bump of the Washington Post compared the State of the Union to the Oscars and the Super Bowl, calling it the "big game, when the president puts it all on the line":

The speech and the media interest it generates are unquestionably a moment of attention that presidents can and do want to leverage. But it is also a moment that, historically, hasn’t done much to change how Americans view the president….

On average, presidential approval since 1988 increased by about half a percentage point a week after a SOTU speech. After four weeks, the average change was at zero.

Fewer people typically tune in to the speech than in years past, as Bump observes. When George W. Bush made the case for invading Iraq in 2003, "some 62 million people tuned in, about 1 in 5 Americans. Last year, only 27 million watched, or about 8 percent." Many other people only heard about Biden's speech "through secondhand coverage — or snippets shared on social media and framed in service of one side’s narrative." As a tool of political persuasion, Bump concludes, "State of the Union addresses generally come up short."

Of course there's also the much-discussed “independent” or ”undecided” voter. NPR profiled one such person, a 52-year-old woman who is "less than enthusiastic" about the Biden-Trump rematch:

"I wish I could take bits and pieces, from their track records and put them together and add a few ingredients and make the perfect president," she told NPR.

She tries to watch the State of the Union every year, usually with popcorn and wine. This time she watched it with an eye to how she'll vote in November.

But at the end of the evening, she was still very much undecided.

"I wanted to say that I could have come away from this saying: 'I'm ready to vote for this guy for president,'" the woman told NPR. Instead, what she took away "is that I feel the same way that I did before: that he's really just a nice guy." In the end, she found Biden's speech overly "vanilla," saying, "I'm never going to get that hour of my life back, you know? I just have that feeling."

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In more normal times, the State of the Union address barely matters. These are not normal times. Biden’s speech offered a powerful example of the type of narrative and communication style he must summon to defeat Donald Trump and the neofascist movement. It now appears that Biden's campaign will seek to focusing that momentum by making this year's election a referendum on Trump and the MAGA movement as an existential threat to America's future. To this point, however, public opinion polls suggest that a large percentage of Americans remain unaware of the danger Trump presents, and the ways he is literally channeling the evil energy of Adolf Hitler and 20th-century fascism.

As Jonathan Cohn writes at HuffPost, "one energetic speech" will not be enough to quell voters' doubts about Biden or to "transform the campaign," but it offers the president a crucial chance "to shift the focus of conversation ― away from questions about mental or physical acuity, and onto the substantive stakes of the election."

For far too long, Biden’s advisers and Democratic Party consultants have tried to keep him away from the press, and by extension from the American public. That is a losing strategy in a decisive battle against fascists and other malign actors; by supposedly playing it safe, the Democrats are playing to lose. To defeat Trump, Biden must be unleashed to fight, as he was last week. Now we know he can definitely do it.