Expanding a bit on Kevin’s point, there is a good chance that tonight’s State of the Union address will seem particularly irrelevant. Perhaps White House speechwriters will make late changes, but for now, Reuters tells us we will get more of the same:
Many of the policies he promotes will seem familiar – raising Pell grants for education, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 and creating a national paid family medical leave program – but the messaging is different.
ABC News reveals another one of the allegedly big policy proposals:
President Joe Biden will use his State of the Union speech to launch a major overhaul of nursing home quality, including minimum staffing levels and steps to beef up inspections while continuing to keep Covid-19 at bay.
Particularly after several governors sent Covid-19 infected patients back into nursing homes, there’s nothing wrong with the White House taking steps to ensure nursing homes are treating residents properly. But it’s hard to see that as a top-tier priority when the largest land war in Europe since 1945 is raging on our screens, and U.S. officials are expressing concerns that Russia may arrest U.S. citizens in that country and use them as leverage. (Is this what Time meant when they said Biden was positioning himself as a modern FDR?)
No doubt Biden will address the crisis in Ukraine, and he will probably speak about it at length. But Biden would be wise to scrap any section of the speech written before a week ago. His domestic agenda was already dead in the water, his job-approval numbers are in the trash can, and his party appears on course for a historically terrible performance in the midterms. Rehashing the same old unpersuasive pitches for more spending — when inflation is already terrible and the deficit is projected to be about $1.3 trillion this year — will be almost laughably tired and pointless. Joe Manchin isn’t going to magically change his mind.
Biden already looks old, tired, and slow. A deliberate decision to rolling out the same old sales pitch for the same old domestic agenda during a serious foreign-policy and national-security crisis will raise even more questions about whether Biden is up to the job.