What Went Down During President Biden’s Speech To Congress

This was a speech that focused on economics. If passed, Biden’s economic agenda would be genuinely transformative. The juxtaposition of transformative policy with dull speech-making, though, is really something. It’s almost as if Biden’s team wanted to keep the speech relatively low-key so that the worst his fiercest opponents on the political right can say is that it made them fall asleep.

This was a pretty typical speech in, as Sarah mentioned, a still very abnormal time in our country. I’m not sure Americans have a lot of mental capacity for a laundry list of policies on everything from climate change to gun reform. The pandemic (and its economic impacts) and the continued ramifications of systemic racism loom so large at this moment that a “normal” speech felt kind of … abnormal.

It was a standard, meaty State of the Union address (even if pedants will insist it wasn’t technically a State of the Union!), with particular emphasis on Biden’s three big spending packages. That’s unsurprising, as they all poll very well. But, of course, as with every State of the Union, it probably won’t persuade Congress to pass any bills that weren’t already on track to pass. I’ll personally be curious to see if any of the bills outside Biden’s “big three” — such as the For the People Act or immigration reform — get anywhere close to passage.