Biden’s Dismal State of the Union

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Friday, February 25, 2022

 

Between 1801 and 1913, the president of the United States sent “information” about the “State of the Union” to Congress by letter, rather than delivering it in person during a speech before a Joint Session. One can only assume that, as his dreams continue to crash down around him, Joe Biden is quietly wishing this admirable tradition had never been abandoned.

 

What, one wonders, can Biden possibly say about his tenure that will not sound ridiculous or twee? His domestic agenda is in tatters. Voters’ impressions of his party are negative in the extreme. The economy is a mess, with rampant inflation, runaway gas prices, and such chronic consumer under-confidence that Biden’s own vice president has publicly lamented the “malaise.” He’s on the wrong side of the growing public backlash against the over-mitigation of Covid-19. And his John Wayne posturing — “Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be President, because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him,” he exclaimed in 2019 — has been revealed for the hollow act that it is on the battlefields of Kyiv and Kabul.

 

The state of the union is . . . well, what, exactly, then?

 

There’ll be no getting out of this jam by pointing to Donald Trump. Modern American presidents are accorded a six-month window within which to deflect blame onto the last guy before the voters swiftly tune out. Biden became president of the United States because the other candidate on offer was Trump. But now that he’s in charge, simply not being Trump is no longer enough. Nor can Biden attempt to diminish his own role within the system. Were he a Calvin Coolidge type, he would have room to make the case that many of the problems with which he has been confronted remain well outside of his control. But he is not a Calvin Coolidge type; he is a man who has become so convinced of the federal government’s omnipotence that he believes that the United States’s failure to cure cancer is the result of too little supervision from Washington, D.C. During his inaugural address, Biden said that America had “much to repair, much to restore, much to heal, much to build, and much to gain.” Standing before the public, he promised to do “great things,” to make America a “strong and trusted partner for peace, progress, and security,” and to answer “the call of history.” None of this happened. As a result, his approval rating is now under 50 percent in every state.

 

The attempts to wave away the president’s obvious shortcomings are becoming absurd. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin — a fictional character who apparently serves as the nom de plume of beleaguered White House chief of staff Ronald Klain — believes that Biden should begin his State of the Union speech “with a reminder [of] where we were a year ago” and then insist that “the improvements are stunning — and too easily forgotten.” “If he can do that,” Rubin writes, “this State of the Union will be among the better ones in recent memory.”

 

Counterpoint: No, it won’t. It might be one of the more outlandish ones in recent memory. But it won’t be one of the better ones. Has Rubin never watched Joe Biden attempt to sell himself before? Has she never tuned into one of his press conferences? Dale Carnegie couldn’t sell this White House — let alone Biden himself, the black-eyed, white-toothed, stumble-prone, faux-folksy gaffe machine we’ve all come to know and disdain. Rare is the bout with the teleprompter from which Biden emerges victorious — and this one will be on in primetime. Speaking about the Ukraine crisis yesterday, Biden appeared as if he had died a few hours earlier and been strategically reanimated by Dr. Meirschultz. Maybe — just maybe — a John F. Kennedy could spin this moribund presidency. But a dead man revivifying a dead administration? That ain’t gonna happen.

 

What should Biden do instead? Beats me. The blunt truth is that he should never have been president of the United States — and he especially should never have been president of the United States at the age of 79. In contrast to many of our chief executives, he was indeed dealt a bum hand, and yet at every turn he has played it as badly as he possibly could. Speak or don’t speak, write a letter, send a carrier pigeon — it won’t matter. This presidency is now a waiting game.