At last Friday’s announcement of his Supreme Court nominee, President Biden spoke to an audience full of Democrats wearing masks. But they took them off for Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night — one of the few political adjustments they are willing to make this election year. But on matters of any greater substance than insincere mask mandates they don’t appear ready to change at all, judging by Biden’s notably stale speech in the stay-the-course rhetorical tradition of other tone-deaf presidents.
The speech was the usual Democratic litany of lies and diversions. Despite his anemic job approval numbers, Biden offered Americans no new ideas. He just returned to his familiar catalogue of tax-and-spend proposals and obtuse obsessions. Do Americans really want to hear about a future of electric cars at a time when they are facing higher and higher prices at the pump?
Biden didn’t speak a word about energy independence. Instead, he rattled on about “a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations,” talked about tax credits for those who combat “climate change,” and expressed his confidence in solar and wind energy.
Climate change, he told us last year, is one the great national security threats facing the country. The truth is that his environmentalism, not the environment, poses the far greater threat. But he has no intention of moderating it. Biden’s essential message to dismayed Americans was: expect more of the same.
He is still hawking his Build Back Better proposal as an answer to inflation, as if the cure for higher costs is printing more money while bigger and bigger government kills productivity. No Biden speech, of course, is complete without a few passages of class warfare, which he duly supplied by lying about Trump’s tax cuts: “And unlike the $2 trillion tax cut passed in the previous administration that benefitted the top 1 percent of Americans, the American Rescue Plan helped working people—and left no one behind.” Could Biden’s attacks on “trickle-down” economics sound any more tired? It was as if he had dusted off one of his Senate speeches from the 1980s.
Biden’s essential message to dismayed Americans was: expect more of the same.
Biden spent much of his speech throwing bones to the special interests of his party. He didn’t even bother to develop any themes or fresh angles for the speech. Once again, he told us that abortion is essential “health care,” even though it is obviously the opposite of health care.
“The constitutional right affirmed in Roe v. Wade — standing precedent for half a century — is under attack as never before,” he said. “If we want to go forward — not backward — we must protect access to health care. Preserve a woman’s right to choose. And let’s continue to advance maternal health care in America.”
He then declared the “Equality Act,” which would, among other things, force religious hospitals to perform transgender surgeries, “bipartisan.” You see, he is very worried that “younger transgender Americans” won’t reach their “God-given potential.” That was perhaps the only novel rhetorical touch in the speech — casting transgenderism, an affront to God, as the fulfillment of “God-given potential.” Somehow, according to Catholic Joe Biden, you realize your God-given potential by rejecting your God-given sex.
Another whopper in the speech was his claim that he wanted to “secure the border.” He made a few such nods to ostensible moderation before quickly resuming his customary liberal pandering.
Apart from its opening section on the crisis in Ukraine, the speech was pretty frivolous and forgettable. Biden renewed his absurd claim that the most basic and obvious voting requirements, such as the showing of identification, pose a grave threat to our democracy. In making this case, he trivializes real threats to democracy and reduces rational measures to prevent voter fraud to racism. (READ MORE from George Neumayr: Reading the Tea Leaves on Ketanji Brown Jackson)
That was bad enough, but he combined this cheap politics with calls for “unity” and looking past “differences.” He still holds himself out as the great authority on democratic comity, even as his Justice Department treats his political opponents as domestic enemies and his friends in Silicon Valley silence them.
Biden claims to be fighting for democracy at home and abroad. But it doesn’t look like it. As evident in Tuesday’s address, he remains indifferent to the protests of his own people.
