President Biden used his annual State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night to kick off the 2024 US presidential election with a powerful speech designed to confront the clear majority of Americans head-on, including a majority from his own Democratic Party, who I think is too old to run again.
The hard-hitting presentation and agitational content had one primary purpose: to challenge his army of critics by leaving them in no doubt that he is going nowhere, that he intends to run for re-election in November and win a second term, even if Al He will eventually be 86 years old.
By that criterion it was a success.
The growing rumor from Democratic election strategists that it was time for Biden, increasingly prone to gaffes and increasingly shy in public, to make way for a younger man or woman has been silenced, at least for now . The White House believes the nascent ‘Dump Biden’ movement is dead.
Biden confounded critics with his forceful delivery and agitational content
But a caller shouts to interrupt President Joe Biden as he delivers the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.
With Donald Trump unstoppable as a rival candidate after sweeping the board (except Vermont) in the Republican primaries on Super Tuesday, the United States is heading towards the rematch between Biden and Trump that most voters do not want; in fact, they are dismayed.
The State of the Union address is usually a fairly dignified and somewhat bipartisan affair, with the president speaking as head of state and not just as the political leader of the ruling party.
But there was nothing dignified about Biden’s performance Thursday night. From the beginning, it was a highly partisan and divisive speech, more appropriate for the election campaign than for a president who was supposed to address the nation on the State of the Union.
It was distinctly non-presidential, more akin to the highly political speeches that British party leaders give at their annual party conferences.
But he was delivered with verve and force (even if he sometimes descended into unintelligibility as he slurred words that came out of his mouth too quickly), which is why Democrats were delighted with him.
He even gave it his best shot when he mocked Republican hecklers, failing to lose his spot. Sleepy Joe had the night off. This was ‘Jacked-Up Joe’, as one American television pundit put it.
Biden had no choice but to prove that there was still life in the old dog, as the poll numbers are truly dire. Her approval rating is below 40 percent.
No American president has been re-elected with approval ratings this low at this stage of the political cycle. Only Jimmy Carter’s ratings were as bad, and he was the last one-term Democratic president, defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
A poll conducted in January for NBC News, which is practically the Democrats’ broadcast arm, found that 73 percent of voters think the country is headed in the wrong direction. Only 19 percent believe their children will do better than them, which is discouraging for a country built on optimism.
Trump has a sizable lead over Biden on all the issues that will determine the outcome of the election, according to a recent New York Times poll.
Biden triumphed on the economy, but voters do not share his optimistic vision
The president poses for a selfie after his last speech before the November elections
He is ahead 57 to 22 percent on border security (illegal, out-of-control immigration is now the number one issue for most voters); 55 percent to 33 percent think it will do a better job in the economy; between 46 and 23 percent consider him more suitable for office than Biden; and between 50 and 22 percent believe they will do better on crime, which is seen as having been allowed to worsen under Biden.
When I arrived in New York on Wednesday night, news had just broken that the state’s governor was deploying the National Guard to help the New York Police Department deal with the crime epidemic in the New York subway system. the city.
When a Republican senator suggested using the Guard to address widespread urban unrest and crime following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Democrats threw a fit and said that idea was beyond the pale.
Now it’s the politics of a Democratic governor in the largest Democratic city in the country.
All of this chimes with Trump’s agenda: the sense that the fabric of American society is fraying on so many fronts under the tutelage of a political elite that doesn’t seem to care. Shoplifting has become a plague and the perpetrators of it can apparently steal with impunity.
Venture into a pharmacy to do some shopping, like I did yesterday morning, and you quickly discover that anything of value is locked away. To get there, you pass through streets populated by homeless people, many of whom suffer from serious mental illness. Some city centers are dotted with tented complexes.
The Biden administration’s inability to control the southern border, with millions of illegal immigrants arriving, adds to the sense of decay and threat.
This explains why the country is in a bad mood, even though the economy is in better shape than any other major market economy in the West.
Biden sounded triumphant about the economy on Thursday, but voters do not share his optimistic view. Biden’s people cannot understand why a strong economy is not increasing his chances of re-election.
The main reason is that inflation is still affecting. Yes, it has fallen a lot and quickly, but the previous price increases are present. Prices aren’t falling, they’re just not rising as fast as before. On average, they remain 19 percent higher than when Biden came to power. Food is 24 percent more expensive, the price of car fuel remains high by American standards, and residential rental costs have increased 30 percent since the pandemic.
That’s why voters don’t see the economy the same way Biden does. Most people think everything was better under Trump. Even a growing number of blacks and Hispanics agree.
However, not everything is going in Trump’s favor. Although he defeated her rival Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, without breaking a sweat, exit polls showed that a good portion of the registered Republicans who voted for her will not vote for Trump in November.
Normally, when a candidate has won the party’s nomination, he or she moves toward the center to attract precisely these types of voters. But that’s not Trump’s style. He likes to stay in the comfort zone of the MAGA cult of him.
Democrats console themselves that Trump’s vote has a limit, and it is below 50 percent, largely because a clear majority of suburban women, the most swinging demographic in the country, will not vote for him.
But this ignores the fact that Trump does not need 50 percent of the national vote to win. He only needs to win a majority of the six swing states that will determine the election, and at the moment he is ahead in all of them.
Trump’s campaign managers were happy with Biden’s performance on Thursday because they believe it cements their control of the Democratic nomination and they are convinced he is the candidate they can beat.
Trump’s campaign managers believe Biden’s performance cements their control of the Democratic nomination and are convinced he is the candidate they can beat.
Their worst nightmare is that Biden, for some reason (perhaps due to what is euphemistically called a “health event”), will resign before the Democratic convention in Chicago in August.
This would then become what is known as a negotiated convention, which is likely to be very complicated, but from which a new, younger candidate (almost certainly not Kamala Harris) would emerge.
By then it would be too late for the Republicans (whose convention will be held in July) to scrap their own nursing home and opt for someone younger.
As things stand, there are no signs that Biden is willing to withdraw from the race. Thursday night will have encouraged him to stay the course. But it cannot be ruled out that events beyond his control may occur.
A negotiated Democratic convention would actually be an obstacle to the process. All bets on the November outcome would be off.
But without such an event, this week will have proven crucial: Super Tuesday and the State of the Union address have cast the dice for the shape of the 2024 US elections. It’s a depressing prospect.