On the menu today: We’ve got a whole lot to dissect in President Biden’s “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore” performance at the State of the Union address last night. I know it will shock you, but not everything Biden said last night was accurate. Meanwhile, an implausible bit of excuse-making contends that political polarization makes it impossible for elected leaders to be popular anymore, but a bunch of under-the-radar governors dispel that notion. And while the president boasts that America is “standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits,” it’s taking more than a decade for promised weapons systems to reach Taiwan. TGIF, am I right?
Riling Up the Base while Calling for Unity
President Biden shouted his way through a one-hour campaign speech that substituted for a State of the Union address Thursday night, offering a blistering indictment of Donald Trump, congressional Republicans, the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers, Israel, the National Rifle Association, credit-card companies, billionaires, Wall Street, Big Pharma (after praising the Covid vaccines!), allegedly sexist health researchers, landlords, an unspecified “business roundtable” that opposed spending money on education while complaining about an uneducated workforce until Biden changed their minds, people who expect their fellow Americans to repay their student loans, Big Oil (hey, how did the president get to the Capitol Building last night?), those who own private jets, snack companies, Mars and Snickers, banks, and those who deem certain books inappropriate for elementary-school libraries.
After all of that, President Biden asked for unity, concluding, “There is nothing — nothing — beyond our capacity when we act together!”
Taken as a whole, Biden’s speech started to sound like Howard Beale’s monologue from Network. But keep in mind, the number of Americans who watched the whole speech, beginning to end, is considerably smaller than the number who will see brief excerpts on the television news, or YouTube, or other social media. By shouting through almost the entire speech, Biden maximized the odds that any clip or segment that went viral would have him looking fired up and impassioned rather than like the sleepy, whispery, mumbling octogenarian that Americans have soured on so thoroughly.
As I put it in that other place I write for, “the Biden campaign staff is probably doing cartwheels.” It’s conceivable that the president will do few events in the coming months, as the Trump trials start, and that Biden will bail on the debates this fall. What we saw last night might be the biggest serving of Biden we’ll get all year — almost certainly the biggest one we’ll get in the evening hours.
The president arrived at the Capitol 16 minutes late because his motorcade took an alternate route to avoid pro-Palestinian protesters. He then took a long time to get to the lectern, shaking hands and taking selfies. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, sporting a “Make America Great Again” hat*, gave Biden a button with the name of Laken Riley, the nursing student in Georgia who was murdered, allegedly by an illegal immigrant who had been previously arrested and released.
During his speech, Biden called her “Lincoln Riley,” which is the name of the head football coach at the University of Southern California. MTG demanded Biden “say her name,” and he got it half right.
Biden berated the Supreme Court justices, to their faces, about overturning Roe v. Wade. Biden referred to “my predecessor” 13 times, including the accusation, “My predecessor . . . failed the most basic presidential duty that he owes to American people: the duty to care.” Democrats chanted “four more years,” creating an environment more akin to a Democratic National Convention.
Biden claimed, “I inherited an economy that was on the brink.” Not even close; the economic recovery from the depths of the pandemic was already well under way when he arrived in the White House. The president boasted, “Now our economy is literally the envy of the world.” Yes, perceptions of the economy are improving somewhat, but few Americans give Biden any credit.
Biden whined, “It doesn’t make new, news — in a thousand cities and towns, the American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.” I marvel at a Democratic president complaining that he hasn’t gotten enough generous coverage. Hey, Mr. President, if you really think you’re getting such a bad deal in coverage, maybe you should agree to more interviews and hold more formal press conferences.
Biden contended he wanted to “strengthen penalties on fentanyl trafficking,” but Republicans didn’t. Ah, yes, that notoriously soft-on-crime GOP.
The most off-the-wall, asinine, ham-fisted proposal of the night came when Biden reoriented his entire Middle East policy to win more votes in Dearborn, Mich.:
The United States has been leading international efforts to get more humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Tonight, 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.
No U.S. boots will be on the ground. A temporary pier will enable a massive increase in the amount of humanitarian assistance getting into Gaza every day.
How, exactly, will U.S. military forces build a temporary pier on the Gaza coast without putting any “boots on the ground”? Is the plan to build the pier offshore and then float it over toward the Palestinians? Is this some spin that if the boots are on the beach, they still count as “offshore”?
How close are our forces going to be to the Gaza coast? No one in the administration is worried about members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other extremist or terrorist group taking shots at American forces? Am I the only one getting vibes of Beirut in 1983 or Mogadishu in 1993?
The Biden administration can find the will and the resources to build a seaport in Hamas territory, but it cannot find the will and the resources to build extensions of border fencing or to build up the U.S. Navy (our fleet continues to shrink)? Or to continue liquefied-natural-gas exports or build the Keystone XL pipeline?
And if we’re going to do the Palestinians some favors, doesn’t that seem like the sort of thing that should involve the freeing of some hostages?
Look, I know I wasn’t the target audience for Biden’s speech last night, and you probably weren’t, either. Nor was this a set of issues and messages to win over skeptical independents, centrists, or swing voters. This was a speech designed to fire up the Democratic base that has grown steadily less enthusiastic about Biden, year by year, since he took office.
Back in 2011, Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, kept warning his boss that he was in serious danger of losing his bid for reelection. The Obama 2012 campaign ran a very different strategy and message than the “hope and change” of four years earlier:
They believed Obama would win only if he won over independent voters. So Romney focused on independents and the economy, which was their key issue. The Republican ground game was focused on winning those voters. “We thought the only way to win was doing well with independents and we were kicking ass with independents,” says a top aide. One senior adviser bet me that if Obama won Ohio, he would donate $1,000 for every point that Romney won independents to my favorite charity. (That would be a $10,000 hit since Romney lost Ohio but won independents by 10 points). In the end, Romney won independents nationally by five points—and it didn’t matter one bit.
As our Dan McLaughlin wrote in 2022:
Moreover, if you believe the post-election exit polls (more on that below), Obama was the first winner since Jimmy Carter in 1976 to lose voters age 30 and over. He lost independents. He lost white women by the largest margin of any candidate since Walter Mondale’s 49-state rout in 1984, even losing white women under 30. He lost suburbanites. He lost white Catholics by 19 percentage points. He lost married voters by 14. You name the group assumed to be swing voters in 2012, and Obama floundered. . . .
While weak in the center, Obama rolled up colossal margins at the edges: 93 to 6 among black voters (96 to 3 among black women), 76 to 22 among LGBT voters, 73 to 26 among Asians, 71 to 27 among Hispanics, 67 to 31 among unmarried women, and 63 to 31 among nonreligious whites. Racial polarization made likely Obama voters easier to identify, geographically concentrated, and disproportionately young, urban, and online. They required little persuasion; the challenge was to mobilize them. Base mobilization paid off down the ticket: Democrats won the national popular vote in House races and won multiple Senate races where they trailed or led slightly in Labor Day polls.
In short, where prior campaigns won the center, Obama appeared to move the center in his direction by using superior base turnout as a substitute for swing voters.
I suspect what we’re seeing from Biden 2024 is a version of what we saw from Obama 2012. Forget the wishy-washy undecided folks in the middle; they’re too few, too tuned out, and too hard to reach. Rile up your base and get every last vote from every blue corner of every swing state. Considering the state of Biden’s overall approval numbers, maybe this is the best strategy available.
To Be More Popular, Try Doing the Job You Actually Have
In a Washington Post column headlined, “Biden is failing at the most important task of his presidency,” Perry Bacon Jr., writes, “Biden backers say this was all basically inevitable: Modern U.S. presidents are usually unpopular; virtually every leader of a Western nation has a higher disapproval than approval rating, because of pandemic-era inflation.”
Okay, so . . . why are most modern U.S. presidents usually unpopular, and why does virtually every leader of a Western nation have a higher disapproval than approval rating? It’s March 2024: Is it really still reasonable to attribute it all to “pandemic-era inflation”?
I realize comparing governors and presidents is something of an apples-to-oranges comparison, but if we’re really in an era of such widespread voter discontent, why is Vermont governor Phil Scott able to earn an 84 percent job approval rating from his constituents? How did Republican Wyoming governor Mark Gordon get himself a job-approval rating of 74 percent?
Every quarter, the Morning Consult survey measures the job-approval rating of every governor, and every quarter, it finds plenty of popular ones. In addition to Scott and Gordon, Morning Consult found good numbers for the following: “Democratic Hawaii Gov. Josh Green (66%), Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu (64%), Republican Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (63%), and Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (62%).”
It isn’t just a matter of being a Republican in a Republican state or a Democrat in a Democratic state. If that were the case, every governor would be popular. New Hampshire’s a purple swing state; Biden won it in 2020, 52.7 percent to 45.3 percent. Sununu won reelection in 2022, 57 percent to 41 percent, while the Democrats won the Senate and the state’s two U.S. House races easily. Clearly, some elected officials are capable of convincing more than half their constituents that they’re doing a good job.
Am I crazy for thinking that a whole bunch of governors have broader appeal because they’re not running around declaring that they’re “battling for the soul of the nation” or pledging, “I am your retribution”? That maybe governors just focus on their jobs, which is running their states’ executive branches well?
In his 2023 State of the Union address, Biden boasted, “We’re building 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations installed across the country by tens of thousands of IBEW workers!” Two years after the legislation passed, the first station opened in December.
Anybody can get up and make a lot of grandiose promises and say, “We’re doing this!” Following up to make sure those grandiose promises are kept is a lot more work and a lot less fun. But maybe the voters just want to see people running their governments efficiently and wisely.
*How many people who justifiably complained about Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman’s not adhering to the Senate dress code will shrug off Greene’s violation of it?
ADDENDUM: Last night, Biden boasted, “We’re standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Straits.” We have failed to deliver $19.1 billion in weapons to Taiwan that we promised and that the Taiwanese have already paid for; what are the Taiwanese supposed to do, throw receipts at the incoming Chinese? The Cato Institute guys are keeping score:
On February 2, the Department of Defense announced a contract award to Raytheon to produce 50 AGM-154C Joint Standoff Weapons (JSOWs) for Taiwan. The JSOW is an unpowered, guided bomb that uses onboard wings to glide to its target from long distance after an aircraft releases it.
The contract fulfills an arms sale that the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) announced in June 2017, creating a nearly seven‐year gap between announcement of the sale and contract award. The contract announcement also specifies that delivery of the weapons is expected in March 2028. This means that Taiwan will wait almost 11 years between the arms sale announcement and delivery for 50 JSOWs.
“We’ll get it to you in eleven years” is not a functional strategy if you want to deter a Chinese invasion in the near future.