What Biden’s State of the Union Speech Was For
President Joe Biden sought to repair Americans’ faith in his leadership with a forceful State of the Union address last night that portrayed him as a resolute champion of financially squeezed families at home and freedom abroad.
Repeatedly through the speech, Biden rejected stark political choices. Vigorous at points, meandering at others, the speech was neither a full-scale course correction, like Bill Clinton’s 1996 declaration that “the era of big government is over,” nor a stubborn reaffirmation of the strategies Biden employed during his trying first year in office. The president at times gave each faction in his party reasons to cheer, but did not align entirely with either liberals or centrists.
Instead, the address showed Biden and his advisers trying to define a distinctive political space centered on providing kitchen-table assistance to average families, encouraging greater national unity, and reasserting America’s role as the leader of the small-d democratic world against challenges from aggressive autocracies symbolized by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The speech was the performance of a president who remains confident in his political compass,
