It's Not Hyperbole, Man!

 

Holding babies in Rose Valley, PA. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via Citrus County Chronicle.  

As I was saying, the last SOTU of Biden's first term was an extraordinary departure from the SOTU norm, which I've been observing off and on since I was a teenager in the Johnson administration (likely for the first time in 1964, when LBJ announced an "unconditional war on poverty in America"), but I don't think I got all the way to what made it so extraordinary. 

Of course one of the reasons it's different is that there's an overriding purpose to this particular speech tied directly to the presidential campaign, as Josh Marshall explains in his Backchannel:

there was one overwhelming sina qua non objective and that was to demonstrate that Biden is vigorous, up to the fight and can deliver on the key requirements of running a national campaign.

Biden clearly did as well with that as you could have hoped for, showing himself to be sharp, energetic, and a master of the detail, displaying passion, humor, and a very good memory. he's absolutely on top of it, as staff has claimed. Nobody who watched it could say he was frail, out of it, or suffering dementia, and we can be confident as he puts himself out to the public in the coming weeks and months that he'll be able to sustain that and an increasing number of voters will get it. He's plainly capable of doing both jobs, of presidential candidate and president; if there's a problem, whether it's bias against the elderly or Fox News or New York Times propaganda, it won't be because of anything actually wrong with him.

So that had been a huge worry among all kinds of Democrats, and I thought it should be a big point in the reaction to the speech, which it has been, and that's great.

But it's not the only point that deserves to be talked about.

It was radically different from the committee-driven laundry list of issues and programs for sale that we've become familiar with in the maturity of the age of television: more like the SOTU of January 1941 he evoked in his first words, in which Franklin Roosevelt warned his audience that the United States would not be able to avoid involvement in the ongoing war in Europe, saying, "this Annual Message is unique in our history." FDR used that fact as an organizing principle for his own speech, expounding the ways in which the nation was already prepared, the ways it needed to prepare materially, the ways it needed to prepare legislatively (assigning Congress its tasks in the war effort), and the ways it needed to prepare spiritually, in what would be a struggle for freedom, introducing his own theory of the Four Freedoms. Biden, in his words—

Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation. Now, it’s we who face [an] unprecedented moment in the history of the union. And yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either.

—acknowledges a very explicit debt to the 1941 speech, but takes on two different tasks at once, in contrast to Roosevelt's one. Congress needs to be "awakened" to the danger it's unable as a body to recognize coming from where authoritarian powers plot against democracy on the outside, the American people must be "alerted" to the danger on the inside, where venal representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matthew Gaetz plot against democracy right there in the chamber.

That's what the speech is about. It has all the obligatory elements of the standard Democratic SOTU, the recitation of the administration's accomplishments and the enumeration of programs, some of them pretty new, that mostly won't get enacted unless we elect a better-quality Congress, but the central subject is a list of specific threats laid out in the opening paragraphs: 

• Putin, for his attacks on Ukraine, who will go on to attack elsewhere if he isn't stopped there;
• Trump, for his invitation to Putin to do whatever the hell he wants
• Trump, implicitly for his attacks on NATO
• insurrectionists of January 6, for attack on democracy (in Trump's name)
• Trump, for his lies about the 2020 election
• Trump, for his plots to steal power
• Republicans, for their attacks on IVF following on their successful defeat of Roe v. Wade (engineered by Trump's judicial nominations) and
• COVID-19, 

Remember the fear, record losses. Remember the spikes in crime and the murder rate, raging virus that took more than one million American lives of loved ones, millions left behind, a mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness.

A president, my predecessor, failed the most basic presidential duty that he owes to American people: the duty to care. I think that’s unforgivable.

and that's where Biden moves into the recitation of accomplishments, but not as the conventional laundry list: in the form of a comeback narrative,

I came to office determined to get us through one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history. We have. It doesn’t make new, news — in a thousand cities and towns, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.

So let’s tell the story here. Tell it here and now.

the story more or less of how Biden has worked to save us from the consequences of the predecessor's misdeeds, starting with the pandemic and its ravages on public health, on education, on the economy, which the Biden administration has done so much to fix, and the speech begins to turn gradually into something much more like a normal SOTU. 

But that first 15 minutes is something else, with its litany of accusations against Trump and his friends foreign and domestic. And they're all true, of course, and all things most voters hate, and we never thought he was going to come out and talk about it. Trump and his movement are the crisis he's warning of, they have to be stopped, and Biden has the experience of doing something about it. That's why he's running.

It was electrifying to me to hear it, and it looks as if he's carrying on now as he hits the campaign trail:

While Biden had referred only to his “predecessor” during Thursday’s speech before Congress, on Friday it was a different story on the campaign trail, as Biden and his wife laid into Trump for raising the deficit, rolling back abortion access and fomenting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol.

He also blamed Trump for the coarsening of the country’s political discourse.

“When you ride down the street and there’s a Trump banner with an F-U on it and a little 6-year-old kid putting up his middle finger,” Biden said. “Did you ever think you’d hear people talk the way they do? It demeans who we are. That’s not America.”

Biden highlighted threats to in vitro fertilization in Alabama after a recent state Supreme Court ruling. “You know why it happened? I’ll tell you why. One reason: Donald Trump,” Biden said. (AP)

We're on.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.