Joe Biden does America First

‘There have been so many accomplishments under this administration, it can be difficult to list them in a distilled way.’ So said Pete Buttigieg, America’s Transportation Secretary, last weekend, when asked why Americans don’t share the White House’s sense that President Joe Biden is doing a brilliant job.

Well, in his second State of the Union address on Tuesday, Biden attempted that laborious exercise in success distillation. He spent an hour and 13 minutes telling Congress and the world about the great work he’s doing.

He talked about having created ‘12 million jobs’ and record employment highs; about the many bills he has signed; about the ways he has tackled inflation; about reducing the deficit by $1.7 trillion. Partisan fact-checkers can bicker over the veracity of these claims and the extent to which he deserves credit. It’s fair to say, though, that Biden’s bragging won’t mean much to the four in ten Americans who feel worse off since he took power or the 66 per cent who say their country is on ‘the wrong track’.

Still, Biden feels he’s winning and he isn’t going to let any pesky polls tell him otherwise. After two difficult years, he believes his presidency is at an inflection point and the arc of history is bending in his direction. The crazy part is he might not be wrong.

‘Because the soul of this nation is strong, because the backbone of this nation is strong, because the people of this nation are strong, the State of the Union is strong,’ he concluded, echoing the leitmotif of almost every president since Ronald Reagan called the union’s state ‘strong’ in 1983.

It’s all very hammy and that’s the point. The State of the Union speech has become a bizarrely sentimental and pompous set-piece – something which, as many have pointed out, the nation’s founders never intended it to be.