In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night in the House of Representatives, Joe Biden demonstrated how one can be aggressive without making a loud noise. The tactic: stalking, pinpointing the target and then the quick hit. He left the roaring to those who had been hit.
It was different in the House of Representatives a month ago. The Republicans in this chamber had demonstrated a different form of arguing: the yelling, the scratching to the blood, finally the half-hearted apology and at the end a superficial peace. After four days, 15 rounds of voting and much public debate, the party finally elected Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House of Representatives.
President Biden had also tried direct attacks in recent months. As recently as September, he warned of Trump’s “America First” Republicans, who posed a threat to democracy. It is a fight for the “soul of America”. At the time, the country was about to hold congressional elections, and the goal was to get as many Democrats as possible to vote. The situation is different now, and the President’s tone has changed again.
Biden jokes with McCarthy
Biden addressed his “Republican friends” in his State of the Union address before the divided Congress on Tuesday night. If it was possible to work together in the last legislative period, “then there is no reason why we cannot agree on important things now.” At that time, a cross-party agreement was reached, among other things, on a huge infrastructure package. Conflicts, on the other hand, would not help the country, Biden said on Tuesday. Right at the beginning, the President joked with Speaker McCarthy: He doesn’t like ruining his reputation – but he’s looking forward to working with him.
How difficult this cooperation is likely to be was revealed during Biden’s speech. Traditionally, all members of the House of Representatives, all senators, his government team and also the chief constitutional judge sat fanned out in front of him. There was a lot of applause from the Democrats on the right, but repeated boos and objections from the Republicans on the left.
It got loudest when it came to the debt ceiling. But Biden knew how to use that for his own purposes. First he teased, accusing the Republicans of having increased America’s debt for four years in a row under the Trump administration. Now, some Republicans wanted to keep phasing out health insurance and Social Security “instead of letting the wealthy pay their fair share.” He was immediately booed violently. Biden replied that he was not saying that all Republicans were involved. And: He is happy that some people have apparently changed their minds. That was the first blow. The President is likely to hold that against the Republicans again and again when it comes to raising the debt ceiling, for which they are demanding cuts elsewhere.
Biden has two difficult years ahead of him, not only because of the divided Congress. In the most recent polls, most Democrats say they have achieved very little in their tenure so far. Only four out of ten respondents want the eighty-year-old to run again as a presidential candidate. However, it can be assumed that Biden will announce exactly that in the next few weeks. The focus of his speech on Tuesday also suggested this.
So Biden devoted himself extensively to all those topics that go down well with many voters: better health care, more taxes for the rich, better schools and no rip-off on baggage fees for flights – all campaign-worthy comments, coupled with a lot of optimism. “Americans are tired of being taken for fools,” Biden exclaimed. He also continued his protectionist economic policy: in future, all building materials for infrastructure projects should come exclusively from American production.
Some of the messages that Biden wanted to send that evening could also be read from the list of guests of honor: the Ukrainian ambassador in Washington and Paul Pelosi, the husband of former spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi, who was killed by an attacker at the Pelosi house in San Francisco had been attacked and badly injured.
Biden paid special attention to the parents of Tire Nichols. The 29-year-old man was so beaten during a police check in Memphis in January that he later died. “Imagine living with this fear for your children every day,” Biden said, referring to black people in America. Every case of violence by officials must be held accountable. On the other hand, Biden also spoke of police officers who are “good, decent, honorable” people.
On foreign policy, Biden only marginally reiterated support for Ukraine and, on China, stressed that he would do everything to protect the United States from Beijing. Biden only touched on his sore points – the situation on the southern border, for example.
From the Republican side, there was hardly any closed applause for the president during his speech, which lasted more than an hour. It was Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene who shouted “liar” at the issue of the debt ceiling – an outburst unusual in the tradition of State of the Union addresses.
Before the speech, spokesman McCarthy had called on his group to behave respectfully and repeatedly urged calm. Donald Trump first etched on his social network “Truth Social” that Biden could not speak because he was stuttering, and later added: He did it quite well, he simply lacked the talent for such appearances. Biden, on the other hand, may have taken the wind out of the sails of the inner-party critics of a renewed candidacy with this appearance.
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