President Joe Biden's third State of the Union address was the perfect reflection of his presidency: undisciplined and detached from reality.
Biden presented a mishmash of economic populism and unmerited boasts about the achievements of his tenure. And while his pre-speech goal was to unify and call Congress to work together, the night quickly broke down to an unseemly exchange with Republicans more suited to the British House of Commons.
He did not deliver a message to the American people that matched the urgency of the times nor the depth of their unease.
President Joe Biden presented a mishmash of economic populism and unmerited boasts about the achievements of his tenure during his State of the Union address.
Going into the president's appearance, 41% of Americans said they are worse off financially than when Biden took office, and nearly three-quarters said the nation was on the wrong track.
Biden didn't offer a course correction. Rather, he sought to convince the country that it is doing much better than it realizes. That's always a losing argument. The anxiety Americans feel is not a matter of perception; it reflects the reality of still-crushing inflation, rising interest rates, increasing crime and a world growing ever more threatening.
The president glossed over the China threat, claiming falsely that the United States is better positioned than ever to counter Chinese aggression, even as our military advantage is lessening. He blamed Republicans for his own failure to manage the border crisis, took no responsibility for the impact his multi trillion-dollar spending spree has had on rising prices. His outlandish assertion that some in the GOP are proposing the elimination of Social Security and Medicare triggered a long and sustained protest from Republicans in the gallery.
Biden stopped to engage with his hecklers, seeming to forget that he's the president of the United States, and not back in the Senate.
The speech was absent big new ideas. Instead, the president offered up a rehash of existing policies and programs, as if they were working. He presented populist talking points that, if implemented, would make things worse.
For example, his "Buy American" proposal, in his own words, would mandate all federally funded construction projects be done solely with U.S.-sourced material. Sounds great. But it requires ignoring the fact that Canada supplies nearly 90% of the soft wood lumber used for building in this country. Cutting it off would make projects here not only more expensive, but likely impossible to complete.
And his pitch to increase the one penny per-share levy on corporate stock buybacks to four cents would cut into profits and impact the return everyday investors get on their retirement and college savings accounts.
There was a lot more of that sort of progressive blather, none of which, fortunately, has a chance of making it through the Republican-controlled Senate.
His most passionate moment was also his most disingenuous and came when he declared if Congress sent him a bill banning abortion nationally, he'd veto it. Now, what's the likelihood that a Senate in the hands of Democrats would ever send him an anti-abortion bill? It was more of the partisan fear-mongering that has marked so much of Biden's rhetoric.
But it captured the essence of a night in which a president who has already lost the support of the American people demonstrated why the people have so little confidence in him.
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