In his State of the Union address, President Biden claimed credit for his accomplishments, drew the contrast with “my predecessor”, announced goals for his second administration, and demonstrated a mental stamina and dexterity that he’s not supposed to have. By contrast, Senator Britt’s Republican response was creepy, dishonest, and insubstantial.
Where was that addled, feeble old man I’ve been hearing so much about?
If that’s who you were expecting to see at the State of the Union, you got a shock: While President Biden did occasionally stumble over his prepared text (the way he has since the beginning of his career), he was focused, coherent, and energetic. After standing and speaking for an hour, he was still smartly getting the best of his Republican hecklers (just as he did last year).
It’s hard to overstate how important that demonstration of mental acuity was. For years, Fox News has been selectively editing Biden to make him look confused (and ignoring all the comparable Trump moments). Fox talking heads (like Britt Hume) have been claiming — based on neither personal interactions nor expert medical analysis — that Biden is senile. And Trump has been telling his crowds that Biden “barely knows he’s alive“. More recently, the NYT and other mainstream sources have been echoing lesser versions that talking point, looking for every opportunity to highlight Biden’s verbal stumbles and emphasize Democrats’ anxiety over an issue that they themselves had been fanning.
Biden has had a hard time breaking through this negative narrative, because every story becomes a story about his age — similar to the way that every Hillary Clinton story became a story about her bogus email scandal in 2016.
Finally, though, the American people got a chance to see Biden in his entirety, rather than edited to fit some preconceived frame. They saw Joe Biden as he has always been: a politician not terribly skilled in oratory, but possessing a clear mind, a straightforward manner, a record of practical accomplishments, and a basic decency that contrasts well with the self-centered dishonesty of his general election opponent (a contrast Senator Britt’s response unintentionally emphasized with an outright lie).
As important as the optics of the speech were, it also had significant content, both in how it discussed issues of the present as well as an appealing vision of the future.
So let’s talk about that content, before going on to discuss the unintentionally revealing response given by Alabama Senator Katie Britt. (Like the speech itself, the summary is lengthy. Feel free to skip ahead.)
What he talked about. The early part of Biden’s speech was devoted to issues where large majorities of the American people agree with him, but Trump and congressional Republicans don’t: Ukraine, January 6, and reproductive rights. He linked the three as “freedom and democracy”, which are “under attack at home and overseas”.
Ukraine was the “overseas” part. Biden took credit for making NATO “stronger than ever”, and said that the aid Ukraine needs to defend itself from Russia’s invasion was being “blocked by those who want to walk away from our world leadership”.
I say this to Congress: We have to stand up to Putin. Send me a bipartisan national security bill. History is literally watching. History is watching. If the United States walks away, it will put Ukraine at risk. Europe is at risk. The free world will be at risk, emboldening others to do what they wish to do us harm.
January 6 was democracy under attack at home. He accused “my predecessor” (in the entire speech he never said Trump’s name) and “some of you here” of “seeking to bury the truth about January 6”. Here, he didn’t call for legislation, but for a more subtle kind of bipartisan action.
Many of you were here on that darkest of days. We all saw with our own eyes the insurrectionists were not patriots. They had come to stop the peaceful transfer of power, to overturn the will of the people. … I ask all of you, without regard to party, to join together and defend democracy. Remember your oath of office to defend against all threats foreign and domestic. Respect free and fair elections, restore trust in our institutions, and make clear political violence has absolutely no place — no place in America.
The rollback of reproductive rights Biden framed as “another assault on freedom”, and he challenged Republicans to guarantee access to in vitro fertilization. (A bill to do that is being blocked by Republicans in the Senate.) He pointed to state bills banning abortion and to Republican proposals for a national ban after some number of weeks.
My God, what freedom else [see footnote 1] would you take away? … If you, the American people, send me a Congress that supports the right to choose, I promise you I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.
The second chunk of the speech was Biden’s telling of the story of his administration, beginning with what a shambles the country was when Trump left office. [2]
Four years ago next week, before I came to office, the country was hit by the worst pandemic and the worst economic crisis in a century. Remember the fear, record losses? Remember the spikes in crime and the murder rate? A raging virus that took more than 1 million American lives of loved ones, millions left behind. A mental health crisis of isolation and loneliness.
He described the comeback from those lows as “the greatest story never told”.
Folks, I inherited an economy that was on the brink. Now, our economy is literally the envy of the world. [3]
He listed his administration’s economic accomplishments:
- 15 million jobs created
- unemployment at 50-year lows
- 16 million new small businesses
- 800,000 new manufacturing jobs
- more Americans have health insurance than ever before
- the smallest racial wealth gap in 20 years
- billions of private-sector investment in high-tech manufacturing and clean energy
- rebuilding infrastructure around the country (repairing roads and bridges, replacing lead pipes, extending rural broadband, …)
He segued from the past to the future by talking about prescription drug costs: Insulin now costs Medicare patients at most $35 per month, down from as much as $400. Medicare has started to negotiate down the prices of several drugs, a number that will rise to 500 drugs over the next ten years. He has capped total prescription drug costs at $2,000 per person under Medicare, and wants to extend that cap to everyone. He has outlawed a number of hidden fees and wants to get rid of more of them.
He proposed a number of plans to lower housing costs, both for buyer and renters; also education costs and the burden of student loans.
Biden recognizes that none of that is possible without the wealthy and corporations “paying their fair share” of taxes. He pointed to Trump’s budget-busting tax cut, and to Republican plans to give the wealthy more tax breaks. [4] The current tax rate on the nation’s 1,000 billionaires, he claimed, is 8.2%, “far less than the vast majority of Americans pay”. He proposed a minimum billionaire tax rate of 25% that he said would raise $500 billion over the next ten years, and invited America to imagine what could be done with that money: affordable childcare, paid leave to take care of family members, home care that keeps the elderly and disabled out of nursing homes.
Then he got to Republicans’ favorite issue, the border.
In November, my team began serious negotiations with a bipartisan group of senators. The result was a bipartisan bill with the toughest set of border security reforms we’ve ever seen.
This, of course, is the bill Republicans asked for, supported, and then turned against when Trump told them that he would rather run on the border problem than let Biden do something to improve the situation. Biden listed what the bill would have provided:
That bipartisan bill would hire 1,500 more security agents and officers, 100 more immigration judges to help tackle the backload of 2 million cases, 4,300 more asylum officers, and new policies so they can resolve cases in six months instead of six years now. [To catcalling Republicans] What are you against?
One hundred more high-tech drug detection machines to significantly increase the ability to screen and stop vehicles smuggling fentanyl into America that’s killing thousands of children.
This bill would save lives and bring order to the border. It would also give me and any new president new emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border when the number of migrants at the border is overwhelming. [5]
When Biden began to explain how Trump instructed Republicans in Congress to tank the bill, Marjorie Taylor Greene (apparently seeing the effectiveness of the point Biden was making) broke in with a yell of “Say her name” about Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, who allegedly was murdered by an undocumented immigrant. Biden took the challenge, but pronounced her name wrong before pointing out that thousands are killed by people who are here legally. [6] He went on to explain that making our system for evaluating asylum claims more efficient (as the proposed bill would do) would lower the incentives for people without legitimate claims to cross the border in the first place.
Biden challenged Trump to join him in urging passage of the law, but then drew a contrast.
I will not demonize immigrants, saying they are “poison in the blood of our country.” I will not separate families. I will not ban people because of their faith. … Look, folks, we have a simple choice: We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it. I’m ready to fix it. Send me the border bill now.
Like most SOTU’s the end of the speech was full of a list of proposals too long to go into here, leading up to this conclusion:
I see a future where [we’re] defending democracy, you don’t diminish it. I see a future where we restore the right to choose and protect our freedoms, not take them away. I see a future where the middle class has — finally has a fair shot and the wealthy have to pay their fair share in taxes. I see a future where we save the planet from the climate crisis and our country from gun violence.
Above all, I see a future for all Americans. I see a country for all Americans. And I will always be President for all Americans because I believe in America. I believe in you, the American people. You’re the reason we’ve never been more optimistic about our future than I am now.
So, let’s build the future together. Let’s remember who we are. We are the United States of America. And there is nothing — nothing beyond our capacity when we act together.
Senator Britt’s response. Republicans choose 42-year-old freshman Senator Katie Britt of Alabama to make their official response. [video, transcript] I’m sure this seemed brilliant to them in a high-concept way: Britt is young and female, while Biden, Trump, and most of the Republican base are old and male. They want to paint Biden as a creature of Washington out of touch with American families, so it made sense to choose a newcomer to Congress who has no previous national profile, and to place her at a typical-family’s kitchen table.
But then she opened her mouth and it all fell apart. As with Biden’s speech, it’s possible to comment at length about either the form or the substance. The form has gotten a lot of criticism elsewhere, most notably from SNL’s cold open, where Biden cuts his remarks short because “I caught a glimpse of the Republican senator’s response to my speech, and I think she’s going to help me more than anything else I can say here.” Then Scarlett Johansson does a spot-on Britt impersonation, saying “tonight I’m going to be auditioning for the part of Scary Mom”.
Lots of people saw Britt’s performance as scary, including Kat Abu, who closed her weekly stories-you-missed-on-Fox summary with
I hope all of you stay safe, and when you go to sleep, make sure to check under your bed for the Alabama junior senator.
Others described her as a Stepford wife, and many women took offense at Republicans placing a female United States senator in a kitchen, as if to say that’s where women really belong, regardless of their accomplishments. You can find lots of such criticism if you look for it.
But I’d like to focus on the content of her remarks, because it epitomizes something basic about Republican politics: She emphasized identity and emotion without any hint of how Republican policies might help the people she supposed cares so much about.
For example, she said:
We strongly support continued nationwide access to in vitro fertilization.
But she did not address the fact that Republican-appointed judges are the ones who put IVF in jeopardy, and a Republican senator is blocking consideration of a bill to guarantee IVF access. So what does the GOP’s “support” mean in any practical sense?
Or consider this guy:
I’ll never forget stopping at a gas station in Chilton County one evening. The gentleman working the counter told me that after retiring, he had to pick up that job in his 70s so he didn’t have to choose between going hungry or going without his medication. He said, “I did everything right, everything I was told to do — I worked hard, I saved, I was responsible.”
And you want to do what for him exactly? Biden wants to cut his prescription drug costs, but you oppose that. And it’s not Biden who keeps talking about the need to rein in the cost of Social Security. So how is the Republican Party looking out for this particular 70-something?
Much of Britt’s response focused on the border. I’ll let Rachel Maddow provide the proper context:
She was one of the senators who was involved in the negotiations to create a border bill. She helped create the bill. And then voted against it when Trump called on Republicans to pull the plug on the bill that they themselves negotiated
So again: Britt appears to care deeply about the situation at the border. She just doesn’t want to do anything about it. And then she tossed the Republican base some red meat with an egregiously dishonest anecdote that the WaPo fact-checker rated as a four-Pinocchio lie:
She told the story of a woman who “had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12”. Britt made it sound like her deal was a consequence of “Joe Biden’s border crisis”, a phrase that she used both before and after the story.
The woman is real enough (her name is Karla Jacinto Romero) and there’s no reason to doubt that she was trafficked and repeatedly raped. But those events had nothing to do with Biden or US border policies: They happened in Mexico during the Bush administration.
After the deception was revealed in a viral TikTok by investigative journalist Jonathan M. Katz, Britt’s communications director owned up to the facts, but still says Britt’s account wasn’t misleading — an obvious lie.
WaPo goes on to explain that Britt’s lie is part of a bigger lie:
When Donald Trump was president, he regularly decried human trafficking that he claimed was happening at the border, including that “thousands of young girls and women” were being smuggled across the border for prostitution. In 2019, we investigated that claim and found no evidence to support it. Most human trafficking prosecutions generally involve legal border crossings, visa fraud and travel into the United States on airplanes. Victim organizations say there are relatively few cases that involve forced kidnapping across the border. This might be one reason Britt regularly cites a case that happened long ago and did not involve crossing the border.
In other words, while the problem might be real at some level, building a wall or shutting down the border would have no effect on it.
Britt closed with a message for “my fellow moms”:
We see you, we hear you, and we stand with you.
But apparently we’re not going to do a damn thing for you. Because that’s not how Republicans see Congress: It’s a place to strike poses and make outrageous statements that you hope will go viral and get mentioned on Fox News. It’s not for passing legislation that might help Americans deal with real problems.
[1] “what freedom else” is typical of a number of small manglings in this speech, and demonstrates the kind of verbal mistakes Biden has been prone to his entire career. I guarantee you “what freedom else” never appeared on a speechwriter’s computer screen.
As someone who occasionally speaks in public from a prepared text, I recognize this type of mistake, because I make a lot of them during my rehearsals. (I’m a little better than Biden at getting words out, so I’ve usually ironed these glitches out before the public presentation.) Mistakes on this level are not evidence of some larger cognitive decline, as Biden’s critics would have you believe.
[2] Trump and his supporters like to forget 2020 happened at all. For example, Tim Scott bragged about Trump’s economic record by quoting 2019 unemployment statistics.
[3] “Envy of the world” is a phrase we’ll hear a lot during this campaign, because while US economic situation is not perfect, the problems our economy faces are global problems that America is handling better than just about any other country.
Every country’s economy tanked during the pandemic, and every government (including the US under Trump) spent massively so that people who couldn’t go to work wouldn’t starve, and businesses that had to close their doors temporarily would have the resources to reopen. When the vaccine did allow economies to reopen, prices rose everywhere, and every central bank raised interest rates to try to rein inflation in.
But the US is virtually alone in pulling off a “soft landing”: getting inflation down while continuing to create jobs. It’s a major accomplishment and Biden is right to take pride in it.
[4] This provoked exactly the kind of protests from Republicans that Biden was probably counting on, and allowed him to ad lib the way he did last year on Social Security and Medicare cuts.
We have two ways to go. Republicans can cut Social Security and give more tax breaks to the wealthy. I will — [shouts from the audience]
That’s the proposal. Oh, no? You guys don’t want another $2 trillion tax cut? I kind of thought that’s what your plan was. Well, that’s good to hear. You’re not going to cut another $2 trillion for the super-wealthy? That’s good to hear.
[5] This led to another back-and-forth with Republicans.
Oh, you don’t think so? Oh, you don’t like that bill — huh? — that conservatives got together and said was a good bill? I’ll be darned. That’s amazing.
One of the most satisfying clips from the speech was Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, the lead Republican senator negotiating the bill, saying “That’s true” as Biden listed the bill’s virtues. To his credit, Lankford didn’t deny it afterward.
Trump’s decision to tank the border bill was a major blunder that gives Biden a way out of an issue that otherwise worked against him. Now he can say something like: “I tried to solve the problem, but my opponent had his Republican allies in Congress block me. They would rather have a talking point than any real progress.”
[6] The larger point is that while the undocumented (like every other segment of the population) do occasionally commit crimes, on the whole there is no discernible “migrant crime problem”. Cities with a large population of undocumented immigrants do not have more crime than other comparable cities.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
During the SOTU, Biden bragged about organizing a coalition to go to war with Yemen in the Red Sea:
“Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran. That’s why I built a coalition of more than a dozen countries to defend international shipping and freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.
I’ve ordered strikes to degrade the Houthi capability and defend U.S. forces in the region.”
The same day as that speech, we actually got an update on how successful this war has been. After 2 months of Operation Prosperity Guardian attempting to reopen the Red Sea, shipping through the Suez Canal is down by 50%. Addled, feeble old man Joe Biden and the decaying US Navy continue to be checkmated by a bunch of Yemeni hillbillies. Defeating Ansarallah is very much beyond the capacity of the loser empire that is the United States.
Biden’s decision to send a carrier group to the eastern Mediterranean after Oct. 7 prevented Hezbollah from invading northern Israel and very likely stopped a wider war. But he doesn’t get credit for stopping bad things from happening.
I’m sure you’ve done a regression analysis and are comparing the Suez Canal shipping today with what it would have been if Biden hadn’t done anything.
Biden sent the carriers to the Middle East to protect Israel from its neighbors as it massacres Gazans, and it didn’t even work to prevent the war from expanding. 100,000 Israelis have been displaced by Hezbollah’s strikes in the north, America is taking casualties fighting militias in Iraq and Syria, and America has directly gone to war with Yemen to protect Israel from economic damage as it liquidates Gaza.
If you check the chart from the IMF, you’ll see how the last decision has been especially disastrous: Red Sea shipping collapsed in late December 2023, right when the Special Military Operation to DeHouthify the Red Sea began. Biden completed Ansarallah’s blockade for them by turning the Red Sea into an active war zone. Insurers look at two militaries trading missile strikes across the sea route and raise their prices accordingly, so it has become cheaper and safer for shipping companies to simply avoid the Red Sea and go around South Africa.
Biden’s bloodthirst and incompetence closed the Red Sea and proved the once-mighty American Navy can’t protect trade routes from attacks by the poorest country in the Middle East. The American empire is dying in the Gate of Grief, and it’s all because Biden is a delusional old man who always chose to escalate in support of Israel’s slaughter.
We can only speculate on what would have happened if Biden hadn’t responded and the Houthis had completely shut down Red Sea traffic while Hezbollah launched a full invasion of Israel from the north. You’re free to imagine that the Houthis and Hezbollah would have done nothing and Israel would have called off the Gaza war, but that conclusion is ludicrous.
Biden is not “bloodthirsty,” he’s supporting one of our allies. And maybe you haven’t noticed, but that support is not unconditional. Also, the “liquidation” of Gaza is entirely due to Hamas refusing to surrender. Their position now amounts to criminal negligence with respect to the people of Gaza that they supposedly exist to protect. Of course, some of us have noticed that Hamas’ sole interest in the Gazan population is to use them to generate propaganda. They may be losing the real war, but they’re winning the PR war as your comment attests.
So you’re admitting the starvation and bombing of Gaza is Israel collectively punishing the people of Gaza for living in an area where Hamas operates? That’s a war crime, and Biden has armed Israel over 100 times as it commits this crime.
That’s a really obtuse statement. If it’s “collective punishment,” then every war in the history of the world is “collective punishment.” It’s retaliation against an enemy that launched a deadly attack on Oct 7 and still holds Israeli hostages. And Hamas is the elected government of Gaza that is supported by at least 70% of the population. That doesn’t excuse civilian casualties, but it provides context. Israel isn’t killing Gazans for fun.
Was the bombing of Dresden “collective punishment?” What about Sherman’s March to the Sea?
I notice you aren’t denying that the civilians of Gaza are being bombed and starved by Israel with American backing. I assume that any future Palestinian retaliation against Israel and America is now justified by the thousands of Palestinians killed in Israel’s deadly attack on Gaza?
Of course I’m not denying that. So your advice is a forever war, for Hamas to keep lobbing rockets and making incursions into Israel until they expel the Jews “from the river to the sea?” Or is there a point where Hamas should give up their genocidal mission and accept that a judenrein Middle East isn’t feasible?
Just curious, do you think Hamas should hang onto the hostages as long as possible? Or that doesn’t count because only Palestinian suffering is real?
Israel’s entire policy towards the Palestinians was predicated on the belief that IDF’s technological superiority could keep Hamas suppressed and besieged in Gaza while their settlers colonize the West Bank without any meaningful resistance. That entire strategy collapsed on October 7th. Rescuing the hostages was also supposed to be the IDF’s job, but they’re currently at 3 killed (at minimum, Hamas has claimed more were killed in the bombing) and 2 rescued, with over 100 left. In fact, they’ve completely failed to defeat or even weaken Hamas in any meaningful way. Their only victory has been against a hospital.
It’s clear now that Hamas cannot be defeated militarily by Israel. All they can do is starve and slaughter civilians to make themselves feel better, the same way the Saudis did in Yemen when they couldn’t beat Ansarallah. In the short term, the only thing that’s proven to free hostages is cutting a deal with Hamas for a prisoner exchange, but it’s clear that Israel cares more about destroying Gaza than bringing them home. In the long term, the only solution is for Israel to give equal rights to its Palestinian subjects in Gaza and the West Bank in a single state, and accept Palestinians having the same political power as Jews in Israel-Palestine. And yes, that involves bringing Palestinian organizations like Hamas into the political process. Israel has already had 2 terrorists as prime minister, so they’ll survive.
Israel has spent the last 50 years choosing to suppress and control the Palestinians through military force. They got the world they wanted, and on October 7th they learned what it was like to live in that world. If they continue to rely on military force instead of finding a political solution, it’s because they consider attacks on Israel preferable to treating Palestinians as equals.
A political solution will require the cooperation not only of the Palestinians, but the surrounding Arab countries that with the help of UNRWA are keeping Palestinians in permanent, multi-generational refugee status, unlike any other refugees in the history of the world. If you think Israel can solve this on their own, you’re either very naive, or on some level, you don’t want this solved because it gives you a convenient reason to hate Israel and call for its destruction, and you don’t want that taken away from you.
The logistics of international shipping require several months of lead-time. It should be expected that attacks in the Red Sea that began in October would result in decreased shipping using the Suez Canal in December.
Blaming Biden for shipping companies choosing to avoid the Red Sea simply tells anyone actually paying attention your agenda is nothing but pro-anti-Israel propaganda and support for a terrorist organization that exists for the sole purpose of liquidating an internationally recognized country.
If the collapse of Red Sea shipping was just lead time for decisions made in October, we would expect that insurance rates would have risen then. Instead insurance rates spiked in December, when Operation Amazon Prime began. This is from January:
War-risk rates have spiked from just 0.01% of vessel value in early December to 0.7% today, Baker said. That means the cost to insure a $100 million container ship has spiked from $10,000 per voyage to $700,000 today.
Ansarallah couldn’t close off the Red Sea alone, they needed Biden to do it for them by turning it into a full-scale warzone. Luckily, Biden is a belligerent dotard who was eager to play along.
Looks like President Biden’s markedly successful exposure of the perfidy that defines all things Republican has some of the cult in a lather.
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