The State of the Union described a world that doesn’t exist.
The State of the Union described a world that doesn’t exist.
A ttention to last night’s State of the Union address focused on Joe Biden’s delivery. As I predicted yesterday, Biden did the minimum: He got through the speech with no debilitating senior moments. He did so in good part by shouting most of the speech. Whenever he would tail off into mumbling at the end of a sentence, or inject a slightly awkward pause, he’d start up the shouting again. Republicans mostly avoided taking the bait of hooting back at Biden, at least until fairly late in the evening, but Democrats engaged energetically in order to keep the visual spectacle lively.
Speaker Mike Johnson stood and applauded only once in the speech, when Biden pledged to get all the Israeli hostages home. Johnson held an admirable poker face for the first two-thirds or so of the evening, although he eventually couldn’t keep himself from rolling his eyes at some of Biden’s whoppers.
The text of the speech will get less attention. That may be for the best: This was an axe-grinding campaign speech with multiple references to Donald Trump (albeit never by name), and containing almost no policy proposals with any hope of enactment through Congress or implementation by the executive before Election Day.
Still, it wouldn’t be a Biden speech without distortions of the truth.
Some of this came in the form of revisionist history. Biden embraced Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin in June 1987. The problem, as I have noted before? Back when Reagan gave that speech, Biden was launching his first presidential campaign, and he blasted the “Reagan Doctrine” so vigorously that Reagan wrote in his diary that Biden was a “pure demagog[ue].” It’s nice that Biden now sees that as a moment of moral clarity, but as has been the case throughout his career, he was on the other side at the time.
Biden lectured us about the need to accept election results: “You can’t love your country only when you win.” He seems to have forgotten that it was Michelle Obama whose reaction to her husband’s primary-election victory was, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really proud of my country.” Or that it’s the Left that is constantly trying to teach kids not to love this country if it’s not progressive enough. Or that it has typically been prominent Democrats, not Republicans, who threaten to leave the country if a candidate they don’t like wins. Or that there’s an extremely long track record of leading Democrats rejecting the legitimacy of Republican victories. That includes prominent House Democrats being unwilling to say they will vote to certify a Trump victory in this very election. It includes Biden himself refusing before the 2022 midterms to say that they would be legitimate. It even includes John Lewis, to whom Biden paid tribute. Just this week, Democratic congresswoman Katie Porter was ranting that she lost her Senate bid because it was “rigged.” We’ll see how much Democrats love America in eight months if Trump wins.
Biden claimed that “the Alabama Supreme Court shut down IVF treatments across the state, unleashed by a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.” But the recent Alabama decision in LePage v. The Ctr. for Reprod. Med. simply interpreted the statutory language of Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act to determine that the Alabama legislature intended to include embryos in the statutory definition of “children.” The Dobbs decision dealt with a wholly distinct question: whether the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment, which says nothing about abortion or children, prevents states from banning or limiting abortion. To the extent that LePage relied on Dobbs, it did so only for the general proposition that courts should follow the written law — a position Biden quite evidently opposes — and for some of the historical materials it cited. In fact, Roe v. Wade was never understood to apply to IVF even before Dobbs. Recall that LePage wasn’t brought by anti-IVF activists but by parents who were trying to use IVF and were aggrieved at the destruction without their consent of the embryos they produced. Biden sides with the idea that parents have no right to choose in that instance.
Biden also engaged in a fantasyland description of the crisis at the border, in which he can’t do anything without passing a new law, and in which the proposed bipartisan bill did nothing but strengthen his enforcement authority — when in fact, it would have blessed his present refusal to do his job and enforce the law.
Biden’s rants about the economy were also fact-challenged. The wealthy are now paying an ever-larger share of federal taxes. Shrinkflation is helping Biden by concealing how much prices have risen. Biden told us that “Wall Street didn’t build America. They’re not bad guys. They didn’t build it, though. The middle class built the country, and unions built the middle class.” Of course, labor unions had nearly no role in the U.S. economy before the 1880s and weren’t really firmly established until the 20th century — after the period of the most explosive economic growth in our history, and very long after the formation of Wall Street. The American middle class of farmers and independent laborers existed long before that. Biden’s obsession with unions, most of which now represent government workers rather than the private sector, is detached from modern economic reality as well.
Then there’s Biden’s announcement that “I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the coast of Gaza that can receive large shipments carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters.” He pledged, “no U.S. boots will be on the ground,” which rests on the bizarre premise that a pier is not “ground” and also that supplies can be unloaded without leaving the pier. It also rests on an underlying false premise that Gaza’s problem is external supply, rather than internal distribution through Hamas.
It must be comforting for Biden, in his declining years, to imagine a world other than the one in which he is politically floundering. But the rest of us don’t live in that world.