State of the Union '22: A Diary (Pt 1)
Joe Biden's first SOTU, as it happened.
Welcome back, Political Super Bowl! The first State of the Union address I remember watching intently was Ronald Reagan’s 1988 speech. I believe I had never missed one until 2018 (and subsequently 2019 and 2020), so I was pretty excited to get back in the game for the first time since that stupid 22nd Amendment told Barack Obama he couldn’t run for President anymore.
Rather than summarize the event like everyone else, here’s a running diary of how I saw it: the hits, the misses, the Ukrainians, and the Boeberts.
How did President Joe Biden do?
Let’s find out…
09:00 EST - If you’d like to follow along, NBC News is the feed of choice. Live from Washington, here are Lester Holt and Savannah Guthrie. Oh, look! There’s security fencing installed around the Capitol. I wonder what that’s all about?
09:05 - “Madam Speaker, the President of the United States.” Here comes the President rocking the handshake line. The printed copies of the speech this year appear to be bound in an excellent leather portfolio. I bet Nancy Pelosi won’t be able to rip this speech up if she wanted to.
09:08 - Some in this country may be sick of what they call “identity politics,” but that’s just always been a polite way of saying “diversity upsets my stomach.” The symbolism of a Black Woman presiding as Vice President of the United States (Formally in her role as President of the Senate in this setting) sitting next to an elderly woman serving as Speaker of the House is a pretty strong visual to beam across not only America but the world.
09:09 After a (too) brief nod to the corner that we’ve turned in the global pandemic, Biden jumps right into the reason we’re all tuned in tonight - we’re meeting with “an unwavering resolve that freedom will always triumph over tyranny”.
We get what will be the first of many focus-shots on the Ukrainian Ambassador to the US Oksana Markarova, sitting in First Lady Jill Biden’s box. She looks pretty young for the position, but a quick google search informs me that she was born exactly three months before me. Let me get this straight: Someone who’s spent the first forty-five years of their life making a career in foreign service in UKRAINE looks more youthful and energetic than I do with my relatively comfortable and privileged existence in what I’ve been told is the greatest country in the world.
It must be all those processed foods.
09:11 I have to admit, I’m a little taken aback by the bipartisan nature of the applause for Ambassador Markova. The House chamber sounds like Cameron Indoor Stadium during the last two minutes of a Carolina-Duke game. Didn’t more than 1/3 of the Senate and almost half the House decide it was okay to shake down Volodymyr Zelensky for fabricated dirt on Hunter Biden like, oh, two years ago?
But there’s more than one way to skin a cat. I guess all that matters now is that the GOP sees the strategic importance of Ukraine, and maybe, just maybe, they’re starting to realize Putin isn’t the savior Tucker Carlson tells them he is.
That’s why it was more important than ever to - and I can’t believe this needs to be done - educate the American people on foreign policy and diplomacy.
That’s why the NATO alliance was created: to secure peace and stability in Europe after World War II.
The United States is a member, along with 29 other nations.
It matters. American diplomacy matters. American resolve matters.
These words aren’t ivory-tower-elite word salad. You don’t have to go back too far into our history to a time when our NATO membership was sacrosanct and beyond reproach. Until recently, one wouldn’t question NATO related to America any more than you would have bald eagles or Whopper Juniors.
Regardless, at times like this, the world and our allies need to know that America’s Commander-In-Chief isn’t working behind closed doors to end the alliance.
09:13 “(M)any others — even Switzerland — are inflicting pain on Russia and supporting the people of Ukraine.”
This too. It’s a shame that so many Americans - either due to intentional or inherent ignorance - will never grasp just how remarkable this is. Getting Switzerland on board is the white whale of European diplomacy.
Joe Biden took office with the most comprehensive set of foreign policy credentials of any President since George HW Bush in 1988. He lost a LOT of that capital with the frenetic and tragic withdrawal from Afghanistan.
And while nobody knows what the end of the Ukraine Invasion will look like, to this point, he’s made extraordinary progress reassembling our fractured and broken alliances at a point in history where isolationism is Empirical Suicide.
09:14 We have our first policy announcement of the night: The United States Department of Justice is assembling a dedicated task force to go after the crimes of the Russian oligarchs.
That’s a win-win with broad bipartisan support. Russian oligarchs are probably the least-popular folks to be targeted during a State of the Union since 2005 when George W. Bush went after Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa for using steroids.
But let’s not lose sight of the developing story around sanctions. For decades, they’ve been viewed - with good reason - as a half-assed way to express disapproval without taking on any risk. Often, they’re described as “toothless.” More recently, authoritarian regimes have attempted to sanction-proof their nations and economies.
Well, that’s not the case anymore. President Biden, NATO, and other western nations may have constructed the most crippling and devastating sanctions against a country in the history of diplomacy. The ruble is collapsing. The stock market has suspended trading for at least a week, and while Russia’s oil exports were specifically not sanctioned, they’re having a hell of a time selling their petroleum, even at bargain rates.
If Ukraine successfully thwarts Putin’s conquest, the entire concept of international sanctions will have changed forever. And for better, if it’s going to keep us out of war.
09:20 If you had over 13.5 minutes for Biden’s first verbal gaffe, pat yourself on the back.
Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people.
That probably got a good rise from all the people we’ve muted on social media.
09:22 Fireworks!!!!
Unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefited the top 1 percent of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people — and left no one behind.
The boos from one side of the chamber are intense. The folks who thought sacking that very building 14 months ago was an act of legitimate political discourse seem to have a strict aversion to telling the truth.
They tried this under President Obama as well. No president since FDR created more jobs or saw a more significant private equity expansion. To hear Hannity or O’Reilly every night, though, was to hear about the coming Great Depression and the lack of workforce participation (A fancy way to say it was Obama’s fault that the first Baby Boomers became retirement-eligible in 2010).
It pulled the wool over just enough eyes then, why not try it again? And try they will.
But you can’t dispute 5.7% economic growth, and you can’t deny 6.5 million new jobs.
I know it’s hard to stomach when you still carry water for the only President to have had fewer Americans working when he left office than when he entered.
Side note: Chuck Schumer’s premature stand and arm pump were cringeworthy.
09:22 Damn! Is it still 9:22? The President is flying through this.
For the past 40 years, we were told that tax breaks for those at the top and benefits would trickle down, and everyone would benefit.
But that trickle-down theory led to a weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits and a widening gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century.
The funny thing about trickle-down economics: Millionaires and Billionaires stopped trying to shove this debunked myth down our throat a long time ago, but Thousandaires and Hundredaires still consider it gospel truth.
Who cares that having significantly less capital than their blue-collar parents or grandparents did at this point in their lives is the likely cause for their bitterness and willingness to follow some truly awful people. They’re just waiting for their ship to come in, and when it does, don’t you dare think about raising their taxes.
09:24 Classic Joe - “This was a bipartisan effort, and I want to thank the members of both parties who worked to make it happen. We’re done talking about infrastructure weeks. We’re now talking about an infrastructure decade.”
Translation: I appreciate your support, my Republican friends. You don’t mind if I point out that you guys couldn’t get so much as a sidewalk crack repaired when you had the chance, do ya? Of course you don’t. God love ya.
09:28 When the President says “Stand Up”, you stand up, Pat.
09:30 “Where are you, JoJo?” - The Administration found the absolute PERFECT multigenerational Pittsburgh union steelworker, holy cow!
Every-day-folks in the gallery is a trick used by President’s going back to George Washington (slight exaggeration). Still, the President used it effectively here as a segway into explaining the causes of this current inflation to the country. More importantly, he laid out a long-term vision that should be familiar to people across the political spectrum: buying American.
He went into substantially more specifics than his predecessor ever did when discussing bringing manufacturing back to America. Not cheap soundbites or hypotheticals, but REAL solutions.
Our supply chain is cranky because of the global reliance on semiconductors? Let’s build a plant in the midwest.
There’s too much volatility in the energy market? Let’s build a network of half a million electric charging stations across the country and have General Motors and Ford make company-altering investments in alternative energy vehicles.
It gives folks substantially more confidence than trying to revive the coal industry - a Dickensian solution in the age of TikTok. And at the end of the day, that’s what the State of the Union is about - the ability to cut through the noise of a hundred different entities with a thousand different agendas and speak directly to the American people.
So far, so good.
Coming tomorrow: Part II
-Ed
Looking forward to Part II - and am hoping that someone (you maybe) heard who the person/woman who yelled something out was and what they yelled about - when he was talking about his son's cancer.