OPINION: President Joe Biden’s Missed SOTU Moment

By: Luke Radel

Whether you love or hate Former President Donald Trump, you can be sure your feelings aren’t shared by at least half of your fellow citizens. According to data from Gallup polling compiled by The Washington Post, as compared to other presidents of both parties from the past seventy years, Trump had the lowest approval numbers from the opposing party of any president, while simultaneously garnering very high approval ratings from members of his own party. Simplified, Democrats hated Trump more than any other recent president and Republicans loved him more than any other recent president.

At this moment — with an 85 point gap in approval of former President Trump’s presidency by the two major parties — Joe Biden came into office offering a different vision: a President seeking to bring all Americans, regardless of party, together.

In many ways, he seemed ideally suited to the task - a long-tenured legislator with a relatively moderate reputation, Biden seemed to be a “throwback” to a time when the parties could still come together to pass budgets and enact legislation. (Social Security and immigration reform under Reagan, Americans with Disabilities Act & Budget Reform under Bush 41, NAFTA and welfare reform under Clinton, No Child Left Behind under Bush 43.)

In his inaugural address, after outlining the challenges facing the country in his view, a newly-sworn in President Biden said “To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America – requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.”

Biden continued: “And so today, at this time and in this place, let us start afresh. All of us. Let us listen to one another. Hear one another. See one another. Show respect to one another.”

Yet here we are, over a year into the Biden Presidency and we’re seeing this same intense polarization between Democrats and Republicans.

After experiencing rampant inflation, continued hesitancy to the COVID vaccine creating a breeding ground for new variants, and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that led to the deaths of 13 U.S. soldiers, (an event noticeably absent from Biden’s address last week) frustrations with Biden’s presidency have grown. Currently, the President’s approval ratings are at record lows, a portent of pending disaster for Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections.

The current strategy of the Administration has been to continue pushing for a scaled-back version of the President’s signature legislation, Build Back Better — oh, I’m sorry, I was told that earlier this month, the White House began rebranding the legislation to “Building a Better America.” My apologies.

On a related note, I’ve decided to change my name from Luke to Lucas. So that makes me a new person, right?

The legislation has been gone through several drastic cuts and name changes because a contingent of moderate Democratic senators, most notably West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, announced their opposition to many of the bill’s central proposals. Whether these Democrats are right to oppose the bill is a completely separate and subjective conversation. At the end of the day, it’s been made very clear that this legislation is dead. (Though if Joe Biden has proved anything, it’s that things that were thought to probably be dead can actually be propped up by White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain for another few years.)

The White House has tried every tool in their repertoire for the better part of a year to convince these Senators to back the Build Back Better bill (try saying that five times fast) — nothing has worked. They are out of carrots. They are out of sticks. They’re even out of the President’s signature ice cream cones.

Nevertheless, in the lead up to Biden’s big night delivering a speech for what will likely be his largest audience in 2022, with over 33 million people watching according to CNN, the White House staff writing the speech seemed to think this large bully pulpit would be able to change the mind of Joe Manchin.

But as Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman told me on "Elected News" all the way back in November, the Biden White House seems to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the dynamic between Manchin and the President.

Biden’s advocacy for Build Back Better does not put any pressure on Manchin to support it and actually creates more of an opportunity for Manchin to oppose it. Standing in the way of the bill and by extension the President’s agenda makes Manchin even more popular in a state that voted for Donald Trump by double digit margins in 2020.

At this point, it almost feels like talking to the President about Build Back Better is like trying to help your buddy who’s going through a bad breakup...“Joe, it’s not worth it anymore, man. You gave it your best shot, but things are just not going to work out. You’ve got to move on.”

This dysfunctional political environment at a perpetual stalemate over Biden’s flagship legislation is what set the stage for the President’s first “State of the Union” address.

As if on cue, terrible circumstances provided the President with the perfect opportunity to move on from his failure to pass Build Back Better and make good on his promises of unity.

Halfway around the world, a despicable tyrant invaded a sovereign democratic nation. Americans of all political persuasions came together to support the people under siege in Ukraine, with only a few blowhard buffoons like Tucker Carlson in the deep minority of people not unified in opposition to the unprovoked attack. All of this happened just a week before the State of the Union address, giving the Administration the time to revamp their speech to meet this new moment.

In the same way President Trump could have sought to unify the country around a common cause at the very early days of the pandemic, President Biden could have used his State of the Union speech to take this moment of international unity to advance a foreign and domestic agenda both parties could agree upon.

Instead of that, the President spent the first fifteen minutes of his speech giving shallow platitudes in support of the people fighting courageously in Ukraine that gained fairly universal applause from Republicans and Democrats in the House chamber, before sharply pivoting to what seemed like the original draft of the speech from the days before the Ukrainian invasion — pushing for the policies in (what else?) Build Back Better, while notably not mentioning the bill by name. Suddenly, the Republicans stopped standing and clapping for Biden and we were back to the polarization of two weeks ago.

On top of this tired repetition of the same BBB talking points we’ve heard for months that really only seem to work on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (to the point where at a moment during the speech, Schumer started standing and clapping too early, presumably because he knew exactly what the President was about to say next), Biden took partisan shots at the Republican side, criticizing their 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and ad-libbing a joke (?) about legal gun owners.

“Ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines that hold up to 100 rounds,” Biden said, adding, “do you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests?” Really unifying stuff, sir.

None of what Biden said was wildly inappropriate or out-of-character for a modern State of the Union address, but isn’t that the problem? Didn’t Biden decry how polarized things have become in our current political landscape and come into office promising to offer a different, unifying view? Biden may be meeting the standard for partisan potshots set by previous presidents, but not the higher standard he set for himself, and that is disappointing —particularly in this moment where he could have set a new course for our politics,  it chose not to.

It’s unclear why Biden wouldn’t have used this consensus-building period to advance a common-sense, bipartisan agenda throughout his State of the Union. Perhaps it was poor strategy by White House staff, or pressure from Democrats further to the left. Maybe they don’t believe unity sells well to voters in the upcoming midterms and the way to win in 2022 is by attacking Republicans for supporting bills from 5 years ago and creating cartoonish caricatures of gun owners, disrespecting their views and demeaning their intelligence.

Perhaps the most excruciating part of the speech was that the ingredients were there to create this ideal unifying address. Just as the Ukraine portion of the speech appeared tacked on towards the beginning, another part of the speech seemed tacked on in the last ten minutes outlining the President’s “Unity Agenda.”

The agenda calls on Congress to take action on four key issues of bipartisan agreement: beating the opioid crisis, better mental health care, support for veterans, and ending cancer as we know it. (An especially important point for me personally and for the President who lost his beloved son, Beau, to brain cancer in 2015.)

Why couldn’t these four items have been the central focus of Biden’s State of the Union? It would have been the perfect political-world-shaking move that would shift the President’s focus from a bill that will never be passed to a popular, manageable list of goals that could be achieved just in time for the midterms that the President and his party could take credit for.

On paper, it appears that Biden should be able to get his BBB bill passed as Democrats control the House and the Senate. But looking closer, you’ll see that the Senate is only 50-50 with VP Kamala Harris getting the tie-breaking vote. This means that if any Democratic Senator and all of the Republicans vehemently oppose your legislation, it is just not going to happen. As upsetting as that is for the Biden White House, they need to move on and try to pass other initiatives. Jake Sherman, a veteran of Capitol Hill reporting, put it very simply in an interview: “you have to deal with the government you have, not the government you want.”

This Unity Agenda could be Biden’s legacy as a President, improving his approval rating and his party’s chances in the upcoming elections, sustaining this moment of national unity born out of an atrocious attack on democracy abroad and showing that ours, the greatest democracy in the world, can come together to make real, positive changes through compromise.

“It won’t be easy for you to move on from Build Back Better, Mr. President. But you’re a good guy with good intentions. I know there is something better out there for you.”

Luke Radel Photo Credit: Ally Bick Photography
Luke Radel Photo Credit: Ally Bick Photography
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[EDITOR'S NOTE:  This post is an opinion piece.  The opinions expressed by Luke Radel do not reflect the opinions of WIBX or Townsquare Media.]

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