Analysis | The unspoken message of Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech was hard to miss

Even if you were only half listening to U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, it was tough to miss the refrain.

Twelve times, Biden said it.

“Let’s finish the job.”

With a to-do list that spanned job creation, cutting health-care costs, enacting gun control and police reforms, transitioning to green-energy and lowering shipping costs, Biden charted a course Tuesday night that would be ambitious even for a president with double the two years that remain in his first White House term and half his 80 years on earth.

He knows this, of course, having served most of his lifetime in more tranquil and collegial iterations of the U.S. Congress before returning to speak as president.

That’s why the subliminal message in Biden’s annual speech seemed to contain quite a different refrain.

Reading between the lines and judging by several unusually tense exchanges with Republicans that stretched Biden’s hour-and-a-quarter address, Biden instead looked to be rolling up his shirt sleeves and saying, “Let’s get it started” or, perhaps, “Bring it on.”

“It,” being the 2024 presidential election.

He clearly had in mind Donald Trump, his Oval Office predecessor and the leading candidate thus far for the Republican nomination.

Half an hour into the speech — and even before touching on the burning American issues of border security, supporting Ukraine in its war against Russia, countering Chinese power or the horrific beating death of Tyre Nichols at the hands of Memphis police — Biden heaped blame on the Trump administration for running up the national debt while praising lawmakers back then for raising the debt limits to allow Washington to keep paying federal salaries and benefits.

Now facing another such showdown over the government debt limit, Biden said “some of my Republican friends want to take the economy hostage … unless I agree to their economic plans.”

These Republican plans included cutting Medicare and Social Security payments and giving tax breaks to the wealthy, Biden charged, before veering off his prepared text speech and urging “anybody who doubts it” to “contact my office.”

“Liar,” shouted Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene, a Trump loyalist from Georgia, just loud enough to be heard above the din of the gallery.

Uttering the L-word certainly isn’t the worst display to have occurred in a building that was the scene for the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, when rioters stormed the Capitol in a criminal attempt to overturn Trump’s 2020 election loss.

It was, however, what an understated Canadian politico might refer to as an unparliamentary moment — one that would have been subject of censure had it occurred in even the most raucous episode of a House of Commons question period in Ottawa.

The fact that Biden bear-bated the Republicans into such a rancorous hiss-and-boo fest, and that he revelled in the outrage, is itself politically significant.

Prior to his address, a column in the New York Times noted the uncertainty in Democratic Party ranks about such Biden seeking re-election at the age of 82 for a presidential term that would expire — should he win — is in his 87th year.

It questioned whether Biden wouldn’t be doing progressive voters a service by stepping aside after one term to make space for a more youthful contender.

“It’s hard to ignore the toll of Biden’s years, no matter how hard elected Democrats try,” read the column, by Michelle Goldberg. “In some ways, the more sympathetic you are to Biden, the harder it can be to watch him stumble over his words, a tendency that can’t be entirely explained by his stutter.”

The vigour and fighting spirit that Biden displayed Tuesday night might have been a personal reaction to the jab of Goldberg’s pen.

Coming up on a year of war in Ukraine, and after fishing an errant Chinese hot air balloon from the ocean after it entered U.S. airspace and was shot down, Biden boasted: “In the past two years, democracies have become stronger, not weaker. Autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger.”

The other two Republicans most likely to contend for that party’s ticket also took pre-emptive swipes at the U.S. president.

Nikki Haley, a former ambassador to the United Nations, brought up America’s messy withdrawal from Afghanistan — one of Biden’s first major foreign policy decisions and, in her opinion, “one of the most consequential failures of his presidency.”

Mike Pompeo, a former CIA director and secretary of state under Trump, wrote on Twitter that the country needed not Biden, but “leadership that never gives an inch in defense of America.”

“Never give an inch,” incidentally, is the name of Pompeo’s autobiography, which is seen as a vehicle to raise his profile as a potential future president.

There are other weak spots too, which explain why Biden has one of the lowest approval ratings among first-term presidents, with just Trump and Ronald Reagan, among the country’s post-war leaders, recording lower scores.

The influx of immigrants through the southern border is largely seen as an unmanageable mass migration of people illegally entering the United States.

Biden said record numbers of personnel are working to secure the border, claiming they had arrested 8,000 smugglers and seized 23,000 pounds of fentanyl. And a new border plan launched a month ago, he said, has reduced by 97 per cent the numbers of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

It will take more than words, though, to convince a skeptical American public that deterrence or border policing operations are having any effect, particularly in the charged environment of a long lead-up to the next presidential election, where the notion of the American border as porous and under siege is a rallying cry for Republicans.

When Biden raised the opioid epidemic and that the U.S. had suffered 70,000 deaths from drugs spiked with fentanyl, Republicans cried, “The Border! The Border!”

And Trump’s response to the State of the Union speech focused intensively on the U.S.-Mexico boundary that he once proposed bolstering with a physical wall.

“Here’s the real State of the Union,” Trump said in a recorded video.

“Millions and millions” of migrants from 160 countries “have stormed across our southern border,” he said, adding that drug cartels have smuggled drugs worth “billions of dollars” into America.

“And under Biden, the murder rate has reached the highest in the history of our country,” he said.

Trump did not cite any statistics or sources for his claim, which appears to be false since the number of deaths per 100,000 people was higher in the 1990s than in the year 2020 — the last for which data was available.

Biden did not himself cast any uncomplimentary charges that his political opponents were trafficking in untruths.

He did warn about the toxic political culture in the U.S., and referenced the danger and damage caused by he called “the Big Lie” — the false belief that the 2020 election was fraudulently stolen from Trump.

But Biden did not dwell on this. He moved on, as the average American seems to have moved on, as even many elements of Trump’s party appear to be moving on, too.

“The soul of this nation is strong, because the backbone of this nation is strong, because the people of this nation are strong, the State of the Union is strong.”

Hearing Biden say the words leaves the distinct impression that the older gentleman in the White House is feeling pretty solid himself.

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan

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