The State of the Union as a Raucous Partisan Rally

How Biden’s big speech landed with your humble anti-Republican scribe

President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address during a joint meeting of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol on March 07, 2024 in Washington, DC. Biden was joined by Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA). (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

You don’t subscribe to this Substack to receive marching orders from any political party or comprehensive ideology. You don’t subscribe because you expect me to react to events the way a staffer for a political campaign would respond.

That’s good, because that’s not what I do. I have convictions—things that I consider very important and from which I will not waver. I believe, for example, that Donald Trump should never be president again and hope the Trumpist dispensation in the Republican Party is repudiated in November with such decisiveness that its loyalists are forced to reckon with the prospect of powerlessness for their loathsome ideas and vision of the country.

But that doesn’t mean I look at the world like a partisan Democrat. My Twitter/X feed is filled with pundits and reporters who write as exactly that. They were positively giddy last night—on both style and substance. Here was a Biden who was feisty, quick-witted in responding to jeers from the audience, combative, eager to take the fight with Republicans right to their faces. He strongly defended his administration’s priorities and the hopes of Democrats in Congress, while name-checking a substantial list of messaging bills authored by progressives.

Biden’s not too old! He’s amazing! He can win! He will win!

Sorry, but that’s not how I saw the evening—and I don’t trust any of those partisan analysts with their highly engaged quick takes. I already knew that committed Democrats like very Democratic speeches delivered by Democratic politicians.

Neither do I trust the legion of right-leaning pundits who grumbled through the speech, sometimes becoming outraged by its shrill partisanship, as if their party’s previous occupant of the White House didn’t go about a thousand times further in deploying hyper-partisan demagoguery and shredding the country’s civic fabric with every public remark for four years. Please, spare me your highly motivated, entirely one-sided disapproval.

Biden Addresses His Party

What I heard on Thursday night was a fiery campaign speech from a very old man who had so much to say that he often spoke too fast, allowing his words and sentences to collide into and run over each other, requiring the audience to fill in blanks or interpolate what he must have meant to say. If you believed Republican talking points about Biden being a drooling, demented Alzheimer’s patient in hospice, then you were probably shocked by his ability to read words (poorly) off a Teleprompter, let alone his quick-witted engagement with hecklers in the House chamber. That last bit was indeed good to see. His impromptu reaction at running into the ridiculous Marjorie Taylor “MAGA hat” Greene on the House floor as he made his way to the podium was genuinely hilarious and a highlight of the evening for me.

But will this make a difference to Biden’s so-far badly struggling bid for re-election?