Opinion: A speech that moved Biden to the center - Marcus
“Let’s use this moment to reset,” President Biden said midway through his State of the Union address. He was talking about the pandemic, but on a deeper level he was assessing his presidency and foreshadowing its future course. Ukraine was the news, and the top of the speech, necessarily and properly so. Republicans predictably heard the address, with its laundry list of liberal priorities, as more of the same. GOP National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said Biden “doubled down on his disastrous and polarizing agenda.” The Wall Street Journal editorial board complained that the president offered “a rehash of his first-year domestic agenda that has brought him to his low political ebb.”
I heard something different, the sound of a presidency shifting — and not just shifting, but retrenching. To the extent this speech is remembered, and few such addresses are, I suspect it will be for Biden’s move from placating his party’s liberal base to recognizing the sober reality that his legislative options are already limited. His presidency is likely to be even more constrained after the midterm elections, which means his political future is tied more closely to finding areas of common ground with Republicans — or at least appearing to seek them — than engaging in partisan warfare.
Of course, Biden took his jabs — for instance, at “the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefited the top 1 percent of Americans.” Of course, he dutifully ticked off the Democratic wish list: paid leave, $15-an-hour minimum wage, protections for union organizing, negotiating prescription drug prices, protecting reproductive rights (though without mentioning the A-word) and “LGBTQ+ Americans.” But Biden spent more than three times as long touting a pending measure to improve U.S. competitiveness with China on technology manufacturing than he did pressing for protecting the right to vote: 278 words to 87 words, by my count. He’d like to see the items on his laundry list passed, sure, but he mentioned them without conveying any certainty that would happen.
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And his message was more Clintonian triangulation between partisan extremes than Democratic orthodoxy. “Let’s not abandon our streets, or choose between safety and equal justice,” Biden said. And: “Folks, if we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure our border and fix the immigration system.” Most pointedly, Biden took on a slogan that has inflicted untold damage on Democrats. “We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training. Resources and training they need to protect their communities.”
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