Listen, I get it — I’m a conservative and there’s lots of things that I think were inexplicable and provocative about last night’s SOTU speech. Why talk about airline fees in the first hour, and defer any mention of the Chinese spy balloon to the second hour?
We also saw that Biden gets in bad trouble when he ad-libs. “Name me one world leader who wants to be Xi Jinping!” he shouted inexplicably. (It reminded me of when he contradicted the entire thrust of his speech in Poland and accidentally seemed to call for regime change in Moscow.) He was emotive and out of control. He blamed Republicans for a border crisis that his administration re-initiated through its executive orders, its discretion in enforcement, and its rhetoric.
But politics isn’t fair.
I think last night revealed that Joe Biden knows his strengths and that Republicans don’t have a strong sense of his weaknesses. If the oil pan underneath the economy’s engine doesn’t break between now and November 2024, the Biden we saw last night will be a formidable incumbent opponent, even against Ron DeSantis.
Coming off an inexplicably great jobs report, with inflation having ceased or gone into a period of deflation, Biden did himself good by focusing on bread-and-butter domestic issues. Nothing could convey more clearly that Biden was embracing his post-Covid, post-Trump destiny as a “return to normalcy.” He talked about jobs, manufacturing, microchips, and making America competitive even in the “forgotten” places. He promoted himself as a man who brought bipartisanship back to Washington and made the government work again. That is a message aimed squarely at swing voters, independent voters, midwestern Catholics, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The GOP response, sputtering about inflation (which is in free fall) or wokeness (which Biden didn’t focus on), fell totally flat. Yes, the Biden administration is doing all sorts of things via executive order to promote and enable cultural madness. But Biden made only the most fleeting and perfunctory reference to “transgender youth”; the woke brand does not stick to Biden.
If the GOP would take my amateur advice, I would have written an emotional response speech that focused on the fentanyl crisis — the 70,000 deaths a year that completely upend any idea that we are returning to normalcy in America. You could build the case for Biden’s negligence on the border on the fentanyl issue. You could build the case that the Biden administration is out of touch by contrasting the reality and seriousness of the opioid crisis with the decadence of Biden’s health department trying to cajole doctors to put gender-confused kids on drugs and under the knife faster.
As it is, Biden came away looking larger and more mainstream than his party. The GOP looked like they were playing for conservative media and not beyond it.