President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night is his first major election speech of the 2024 campaign. Yes, he’s the president and he’s giving the speech in his official capacity, not at a campaign rally. But the power of incumbency is that you get to make your pitch to the nation in front of all the major networks, with the U.S. Congress as your backdrop. There are important governing imperatives for Biden in this speech — pushing the House to take up the aid package for Ukraine and Israel passed by the Senate and laying out the framework for funding the government through the rest of the year, to name a few. But it’s worth thinking about this particular State of the Union through an explicitly re-election-related lens.
The power of incumbency is that you get to make your pitch to the nation in front of all the major networks, with the U.S. Congress as your backdrop.
The Biden record on domestic policy, particularly economic management and investment, remains underpublicized, underrecognized by the public and wildly impressive. With tens of millions of voters watching, Thursday would be a good time to run through the many popular programs and achievements that make up that record.
The Biden presidency has overseen strong job creation and consistently low unemployment. Wage inequality is going down. Real wages are up. The U.S. economy has the highest growth rate of any peer country in the G7 and the lowest inflation of those peer countries.
Small-business applications are booming, and the IRS is catching more tax cheats, recouping millions. Manufacturing investment has exploded, helping areas that have been hit hard by deindustrialization.
A record number of people signed up for health insurance via the Affordable Care Act in 2024. Crime and disorder, which spiked during the pandemic, are receding. Homicides rocketed during Trump’s last year in office by the largest one-year percentage increase in a generation — bit it’s now looking like 2023 may have experienced one of the biggest one-year drops in the homicide rate in recorded history. I’ll say it again, since no one seems to know this: According to provisional data, Biden may have overseen the single biggest one-year drop in homicides on record.
Renewable energy sources are surging, helped along by the Inflation Reduction Act. At the same time, the U.S. is keeping oil prices low to sustain the political conditions for the green transition by pumping more oil and gas than any country ever in recorded history. (I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it’s also true.)
This is a damn good record. In fact, the topline macroeconomic indicators, from growth to unemployment to inflation and interest rates, are better now than they were in 1984 when Ronald Reagan ran his famous “Morning in America” ad. After the most seismic and totalizing disruption to American daily life since World War II, some version of equilibrium, normalcy and renewed vigor has been returned to the country that experienced both a historic pandemic and a historic attempted coup.
It’s an old cliché that elections are about the future, and here’s where I think concerns about Biden’s age intersect with a notable blind spot in his political messaging. What is the Biden second-term agenda? His message in 2020 was crystal clear: He would be a bipartisan dealmaker who put the interests of Americans first and brought back common sense to a government that was being run by the most recklessly volatile man ever to the lead the country. He would get Covid under control and transition the country to a new thriving and growing normal; he would appoint liberal justices to the Supreme Court; he would make rich folks pay their fair share (a promise only partially fulfilled); he would invest in America to get it working again.
What is the 2024 version of that set of promises? Herein lies the huge opportunity for this speech.
But what is the 2024 version of that set of promises? Herein lies the huge opportunity for this speech. Biden must lay out a future-oriented agenda, one that protects our freedoms, protects our democracy and continues to invest in a strong middle class. Obviously, he should tell voters that he wants to sign into law a bill that restores the constitutional protections for reproductive freedom stolen by conservative judges and highlight the extremism of the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that shut down IVF in that state. A majority of Republican House members, including Speaker Mike Johnson, are co-sponsors of the Life at Conception Act, a bill that could effectively nationalize that Alabama ruling.
Biden should also talk about the acute threats to democracy our nation faces, threats that require the protections and accountability promised by the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which remains blocked by Republicans. But on core economic issues, I think he needs to tell Americans how he will continue to reduce costs and make things more affordable, from prescription drugs to child and elder care to electricity, heating, transportation and to perhaps, most crucially, housing.
One reason the attacks on Biden’s age are so potent is that, at the most basic level, they aren’t rebuttable. He really is 81 years old, and that really is the oldest any presidential candidate has ever been. Biden can’t change his age, but he can focus voters and his campaign on the future. This year’s State of the Union is his best opportunity to do just that.
