March 8, 2024 - 10:00am
In front of one of the largest captive audiences he will have prior to the presidential election this autumn, 81-year-old Joe Biden used this year’s State of the Union address to show he can still conjure the swagger and energy that once made him a reasonable facsimile of an old-school, tough-guy Rust Belt politician.
For longtime observers of political rhetoric, it was a strange spectacle: the President, with that characteristic squint he employs when reading giant text from a teleprompter, started by shouting his support for Ukraine and ended in more hushed tones, perhaps due to fatigue, with the cautious endorsement of a two-state solution in Israel. Along the way, amidst shouts from the gallery, he attempted to joust with the likes of Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. As she drew attention to the murder of a young woman by an illegal immigrant, Biden sheepishly noted that “legals” kill thousands.
While accurate — American citizens do indeed commit the bulk of murders occurring in America — this sort of awkward phrasing accompanied much of the President’s high-wire act. He entered with much to prove and many objectives to accomplish, too many even for a young and energetic politician like his former boss, Barack Obama. At points, he nodded toward bipartisanship, such as when he tried to muster praise for the nation’s uneven economic performance or when he stumped for a doomed immigration reform bill that once seemed like a legislative fait accompli. These issues are now hopelessly politicised, as the shouts and murmurs of Republican discontent conveyed.
For the most part, though, this was a garden-variety campaign speech, albeit one delivered directly from the bully pulpit. Between staccato boasts about his achievements (America has, in his speechwriter’s words, gone “from setback to comeback”), Biden would segue into instances of pure campaigning. He branded the January 6 riots a “dagger at the throat of American democracy”, and seized numerous opportunities to criticise the misdeeds and mistakes of his “predecessor”, which included failing to ensure that the government “bought American” on infrastructure products.
Surely eager to remove the stain of special counsel Robert Hur’s characterisation of him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”, Biden spoke with extraordinary fervour. Although he sometimes fell into moments of stuttering and stammering, mispronouncing words or placing emphasis on the wrong syllables, his ad-libs — particularly about his advanced age — were engaging and mostly effective, recalling his brighter moments on the campaign trail in 1988 or his Senate interrogation of controversial Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991.
All the same, the overall effect of the speech wouldn’t be lost on longtime watchers of The Simpsons — it was akin to that newspaper photo of Grandpa Simpson, angrily shaking his fist beneath a headline that reads “Old Man Yells at Cloud.”
While Biden has now proved he can not only last an hour on the microphone with the assistance of a kindly teleprompter but emote from the diaphragm while doing so, it remains to be seen what impact, if any, this speech will have on an electorate which has significant concerns about both candidates. He did the work, gutting his way through another State of the Union, but were any but his truest believers truly here for it (“the Squad” of far-Left legislators refused to clap for his entrance)? In any case, Biden is going to need to dig deep to find the energy for the next eight months of hard campaigning, because a rejuvenated Donald Trump certainly isn’t going to settle for another sedate “front porch” campaign decided by mail-in ballots.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work
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SubscribeIf he isn’t an elderly man with a poor memory, then put him in the courtroom that Robert Hur said he should be spared.
aren’t presidents immune?
Biden stole the documents during his Senate career, when, except for being a high ranking Democrat, the law would apply.
Then he can pardon himself.
Not funny. America has for President the actual threat Trump was falsely accused…by Biden…of being.
He would have to resign to be pardoned. Of course Kamala Harris would do that as Ford did for Nixon.
Biden also repeatedly plagiarized speeches, most notably Kinnock’s speech which forced him to step down one election. Biden’s hardly an ‘eloquent orator’ – no ‘gift of Irish gab’ does he possess. He’s just a bitter and angry man today. His State of the Union speech was depressing and uninspiring, and statistically wrong on a number of important points.
The State of the Union given last night was the bellicose, divisive, angry speech of a dictator flailing away, blaming his failure on those he has already disempowered. This tyrant literally claimed he cured the border, which we now know he broke to enable an invasion of the nation he swore to protect.
Wow, am I being censored?
Dunno, who are you?
“…young and energetic…..like Barack Obama…” Surely you jest. Obama was a lazy, indifferent opportunist who sweet-talked the American people into believing in him. A charlatan. And now, an extremely wealthy one.
What about choosing a username so we can differentiate you from all the other UnHerdreaders?
This guy was pumped full of amphetamines and B12 just to keep his eyes open. Wouldn’t surprise me if his string-pullers wired him up with little electric shocks lest he nod off or glitch out. The entire world is watching this spectacle. Even if they hate or fear a second Trump presidency, they would at least be relieved of the cringing fremdschamen.
I thought he was jacked up as well. All the yelling was weird.
The anger and yelling is a symptom of dementia. I became aware of this from personal experience with relatives. It doesn’t get better with time…
I’m spookily reminded of the legend of El Cid. From Wikipedia:
Set aside the histrionics and the partisan reactions, and answer this: are you, and is the country, better off today than it was four years ago? The donor class will certainly say ‘yes’ as it profits mightily from the corporatism that exists. But Joe and Jane America have record credit card debt, they see the inflation with their own eyes, and they see a govt that has prioritized illegals and people in other nations over its own citizens.
As we watched the SOTU together, one of my adult children said, “He’s on amphetamines”.
Was your child drunk? Were you?
Uh oh! The old man knocked it out of the park and the Trumpbots are worried!
And so you should be. The shrinking MAGA constituency, represented so eloquently by swivel eyed loon Marjorie Taylor Greene, know that their moronic godking shoots himself in both feet every time he speaks but they have to cheer along or be excommunicated.
Biden in another landslide after this triumph!
Bet your house on it CS, you’ll make a lot of money, and from what you say there’s no possible way Biden could lose.
I took notes on the speech and prepared a brief synopsis of the “Forceful, fiery, high energy speech” given by an “empathetic consensus builder” that hails from a “Working Class” section of the Rust Belt that forms the “Soul of the Nation.”
Get off my lawn!
A sad shell of a man clinging to power, jacked on stimulants, using the “union” speech to sow greater division. The best part was Mike Johnson’s subtle eye rolls and grimaces. Thank you Speaker Johnson for your implicit rebuttal of institutional derangement.
My prediction is he won’t make it, live, through the election. Wonder what kind of a mess that would create? I imagine their are all sorts of head shacks trying to figure that possibility out and what it would legally mean. The VP continues on?
Holy cow what a mess. This is stupid.
“I imagine their are all sorts of head shacks trying to figure that possibility out and what it would legally mean.”
You’re not what one would describe as a “constitutional scholar” then?
For sure not. Hence the question marks you so astutely picked up on. You have no opinions to my questions so I’ll assume you are not a ‘scholar’ in these constitutional matters either.
You people really are a cult, aren’t you?
We watch Trump ramble on with his stream-of-consciousness insanity and you all think, “hey, this guy knows what’s up!”, then Biden comes out with a great speech and the best you can muster is “oh, he must have been on drugs:?
Trump loses again in ANOTHER landslide.
Here’s a comparison of Biden’s SOTU clips. He did well on the speech because he said very little new.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66MkxtvJh8c
No ones coming to save us, both Trump and Biden are awful in their own ways and none of them have any real ideas or vision to get America out of its problems, or even genuinely interested in the role and tend to regard the problems something to be exploited to feed their own vanities. Many Americans as a result feel politically homeless due to correct feeling that neither party represents them, both stated above are not just American issues, but are reoccurring else were throughout the west as well. We live in an age of corrupt, amoral fools ruling over us.