Biden’s big primetime moment
How the president explains a sprawling domestic agenda and knotty foreign policy during tonight’s State of the Union address will reveal whether he can persuade Americans to reelect him this November.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. I’m Michael Jones. Thanks for spending part of your evening with me.
It’s Thursday, March 7. In tonight’s edition, I preview the State of the Union address President Joe Biden will deliver to the nation from the US Capitol in about 90 minutes.
As I wrote in my weekly COURIER column, the topic du jour on the Hill this week has been whether House Republicans will practice decorum or resort to the heckling that dominated last year’s affair.
You may recall that Biden was interrupted several times, including when Reps. Bob Good (R-Va.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called the president a liar when he accused Republicans of attempting to cut Social Security and Medicare. (Greene also refused to stand when Biden introduced the Ukrainian ambassador to the US and the family of Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old Black man five Black Memphis police officers killed during an arrest the month before Biden’s address.
Greene made no promises to behave herself: “I’ve been asked a lot about decorum,” she told a group of reporters on the House steps this afternoon. “It depends on what the president has to say tonight. And we’ll see what I think and feel at the time.”
Alrighty, then.
Send me a message with your State of the Union questions—or anything else about congressional politics—and I’ll hit you back.
Thank you for being you,
Michael
What to expect from Biden’s SOTU tonight
Nikki Haley—former President Donald Trump’s United Nations ambassador who went on to challenge her old boss for the Republican presidential nominee—suspended her campaign yesterday after succumbing to an insurmountable deficit in the number of delegates required to win her party’s nod.
Haley’s decision officially made the presidential election what we always knew it already was— race between two known entities. On the one hand, you’ve got a former president on a warpath of retribution who’s made it clear a second term would bring with it more tax cuts for the rich, harsher abortion restrictions, mass deportations and the abandonment of US allies and its global alliances. On the other, the current chief executive is dogged by outsized concerns about his vitality, Middle East policy and an electorate unaware of the historic legislation he helped shepherd into law.
Against this backdrop, President Biden will address the nation in the third State of the Union of his administration and arguably the most important.
“The State of the Union has one core use in that it allows Americans who aren’t focused on politics every single day to see, ‘What is my government focused on? What is the president focused on?’” a source close to the Biden administration told me this week. “All they would assume, if they watched, take your pick of cable news, is division and fighting. They don’t see the hard bipartisan work that the president has been doing, along with his administration, this whole time.”
In addition to the opportunity the president and his writers have to showcase the good leadership and governance that his administration has focused on since day one, the source added that the speech gives Biden an enormous bully pulpit to draw a sharp contrast between Trump.
“In light of the fact that this is now officially a two-horse race, this is going to be a Biden-versus-Trump experience over the next eight months,” they said. “What we’re going to be seeing is a comparison between what we feel is a bipartisan-focused, American-focused, good-governance focused administration—and moving backwards on the other side.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told me last week that House Democrats hope to hear President Biden’s vision for the next several years.
“Under President Biden’s leadership, in terms of building a healthy economy, lowering costs, increasing access to affordable housing, keeping our communities safe, and making sure that there’s economic opportunity in every zip code—President Biden has credibility in all of those areas,” Jeffries said. “So that’s the moment that we are in right now, with a recognition there’s still a significant amount of work that needs to be done.”
The president will outline his record and vision into four key sections, a senior House Democratic aide who was briefed on the speech told me: Progress and possibility, defending democracy and freedoms, building the economy from the middle out and bottom up, moving the country forward and not backward.
Within these pillars, Biden is expected to unveil new policy proposals on tax reform, student loan junk fees, expanding health care and restoring abortion rights and more.
He’ll use the guests who members and administration officials invited to attend the speech to humanize the policies. And he’ll tout his work in these areas to make the case for a second term.
Beyond his domestic agenda, Biden will also speak about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. House Republicans will bristle when he attempts another appeal for them to pass legislation unlocking billions of dollars in aid for Ukraine. Progressives will be unsatisfied with anything but a call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza.
The president will also revisit his Unity Agenda, the set of items with bipartisan support: Ending cancer as we know it, supporting our veterans, tackling the mental health crisis, and beating the opioid and overdose epidemic.
From housing to voting rights to gun violence prevention to reproductive freedom, many members have successfully lobbied the president to uplift their issues in the speech.
Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Financial Services, received a commitment this morning that Biden will address the affordable housing crisis—much-needed attention as she works to advance a package of housing bills to end homelessness.
Two dozen members, including the top three House Democrats and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), will host people affected by the fall of Roe v. Wade.
“I think he’s going to speak to women. I think he clearly understands the power of the number of women who vote,” Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) told a group of reporters at a CBC event last week. “And the biggest thing that you look at the data and across the country is talking about reproductive rights and freedoms. I am comfortable that you will hear something in that.”
Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.) noted that this year’s State of the Union is on the actual day of Bloody Sunday.
“I’m sure there was no intention on my Republican colleagues in choosing that day,” she told me. “But we’re going to seize the opportunity of having the State of the Union be on that anniversary date by welcoming some of the foot soldiers who will remind all of us that we have a role to play in making sure that this country lives up to its highest ideals of equality.”
Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.), who chairs the CBC, added: “What we hope to hear from the president is that he will use the moment of the State of the Union and the anniversary of Bloody Sunday to lift up and to tie the fight for democracy, for voting rights, and the fight for economic justice together. That is what we hope to hear from the president. And he is uniquely capable of, as he’s done in the past, using the moment to speak to the minds and hearts of the American people to explain this.”
The president spent this past weekend at Camp David preparing for the speech with his senior staff. Biden is personally involved with fine-tuning the speech down to the word and incorporating conversations he’s had over the past year with Americans into the various sections.
It should come as no surprise that Republicans see it differently.
“Underneath the administration’s rhetoric about lowering prices for American consumers, the hard reality is that prescription drug socialism means higher prices and fewer treatments,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during a floor speech following an announcement that the White House received counteroffers from the producers of 10 medicines Medicare is negotiating with over government price-setting. “Apparently, the Biden administration is really just out to make it harder for the world’s foremost engine of medical innovation to do what it’s best at—finding cures. And the worst side effect? The millions of people who will go without groundbreaking American-made treatments.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) called out the president for an unwillingness to work across the aisle, an accusation that feels impotent when lodged against a president who often pisses the left flank of his party off for adhering too often to bipartisanship.
“When you look at all the crises Joe Biden’s created on so many fronts: Economic crisis, energy prices, foreign policy crisis, where our allies are on fire and our enemies are running roughshod over other nations,” Scalise said this week. “When he talks about a reset, is it going to be more empty rhetoric or is Joe Biden really going to work with Republicans to solve these problems? We stand ready. This House has acted every time there’s been a crisis and worked on solutions to fix those problems.”
Scalise forgot to mention his majority has relied on Democratic votes to do so each time, but I digress.
The attacks against Biden won’t be limited to before the speech.
Katie Britt, a first-term senator from Alabama who’s viewed by many as a rising star within the Republican Party, will deliver the GOP response to Biden’s address.
“Britt should be more concerned about the state of her state, but she has still refused to condemn the devastating court ruling that ripped away the promise of a family for so many Alabamans,” Democratic National Committee spokesman Alex Floyd said in a statement, referring to the recent Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos created through in vitro fertilization are considered children. “Make no mistake: Britt and her fellow MAGA extremists are backing a cruel, dangerous and unpopular anti-choice agenda that would outlaw abortion nationwide and risk access to IVF for Americans trying to grow their family.”
When you’re the oldest president in US history and an overwhelming majority of the country thinks you’re too elderly to serve, it’s not just about what Biden says—but how he says it.
“I think on the personal side, he’s going to be able to dispel some of the disparaging myths that exist around him as an individual for some number of Americans who are looking at what they see on television from the talking heads and internalizing that,” the source close to the administration said.
For some Democrats, the fact that his age is central to the campaign is exhausting.
“I think it’s offensive to suggest that if you’re a certain age, you shouldn’t be doing certain things or you can’t think or you can’t make decisions,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.), a first-term member who was with the president in Los Angeles last month. “We can talk about so many legends who are still living, who are here, who are in their 100-percent right mind and are using their history to help inform younger generations about the troubles ahead and why votes, why elections are so important.”
The State of the Union will be the main event tonight, but it’s also often the catalyst for a post-speech roadshow designed to reach voters with the president’s message where they are.
Biden will travel to Philadelphia and Atlanta this weekend and Vice President Harris will head to Arizona and Nevada in the days ahead. (What do these destinations have in common? They’re all swing states or cities within swing states that Biden won in 2020 and will likely need to again for reelection.) Throughout the month, cabinet officials and surrogates will also crisscross the nation promoting the president’s agenda.
“The speech itself sets a set of bedrock points that we then rally around,” the source close to the administration said. “It’s not just talking heads on CNN or MSNBC, but trusted faces that people know and want to hear from who can then take that high-level policy and connect it back to those local issues. Because in the end, what’s more important to someone is getting that pothole fixed that they hit every single day. And that [impacts] them in a way that some of these larger, more existential policy proposals don’t.”
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