The Biden 2024 strategy promises you only one thing: a campaign of fear.
Well he didn’t die onstage, so there’s that. Kidding aside — and there were moments there, in the back half of Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last night, when he went off script and almost immediately lost the plot — our enfeebled president’s bearing and delivery were serviceable enough for an 81-year-old whose primary goal was to demonstrate some facsimile of vigor. (His way of doing so primarily seemed to be by barking angrily, like Grandpa Simpson lecturing a cloud.)
So regardless of your position about the upcoming election, this counts as a marginal strategic win for Joe Biden. (At the very least, he avoided a disastrous gaffe in what will be one of the very few extended public spotlights either candidate will have during the general-election campaign.) Will he persuade anyone not already willing to vote for him despite his objectively terrible record and his visible deterioration? The tone of his speech — which was transparently far more a campaign rally than a traditional State of the Union — suggests that his campaign strategists don’t care, which is the most interesting takeaway from last night.
Again, I’m not particularly interested in analyzing the policy substance of Biden’s State of the Union on the merits — what is there to say? Biden’s policies on everything except perhaps Ukraine are indefensible (and even that is a subject of great dispute on the right presently). The speech was a partisan pig circus where the president turned from sops to giveaways to pie-in-the-sky promises, making carefully segmented appeals to every political demographic Democrats normally rely on (and that they’re losing ground with in the polls). Suburban women (with gun control), the “educational class” of white-collar workers and thirtysomething voters (student-loan forgiveness), angry college kids and twentysomethings in the streets over the Gaza War — the speech was structured clearly to address Biden’s weaknesses with all of these core demographics for the party.
(Of note elsewhere: Biden’s inability to address America’s core objection to his record on border security will not be effaced by his repeated importuning to “send him a bill.” The bill isn’t the problem and voters know it. The problem is Biden’s executive orders and the fact that globally he and his party are perceived as for “open borders,” which triggers the flood of migrants in the first place. Trump didn’t have this problem during his administration.)
The sole act of “outreach” (if you will) to the great American center in Biden’s pitch was his reminder of Trump’s role in January 6. It’s going to feature heavily in Democratic appeals to swing voters over the next several months, and its effectiveness in 2022 is what gives Dem strategists hope that the trick can be repeated. But it is a strangely negative appeal to the people who will decide Biden’s fate: Vote for me not because of what I’ve done for you — those direct appeals are for the Left only — but rather because of who I am not. Persuasion is out the window. For the Left, Biden’s approach will be transactional as always, giving them the policy achievements that grease internal party gears. But for the majority of the country, the Biden 2024 strategy promises you only one thing: a campaign of fear.