What Went Down During President Biden’s Speech To Congress

Americans are pretty skeptical of foreign involvement these days, so Biden’s decision to remove American troops from Afghanistan polls extremely well. Who knows about the actual impact it will have on national security, but politically it was a popular decision.

Biden, like many politicians, don’t talk about racial equity in policing without first acknowledging their support of the police, just as they can’t seem to criticize police violence without criticizing protesters and “rioters.” It’s reminder of how hard all issues surrounding race are for politicians in this country, especially those who rely on a cross-racial constituency to stay in power.

Notably, both Democrats and Republicans want some sort of reform, according to a recent survey from Vox/Data For Progress. Nearly three-fourths of Americans (71 percent) either support or strongly support a federal ban on police chokeholds, according to that survey. Seventy-one percent of respondents also want to end police racial profiling, while 84 percent are in favor of mandating body camera use. (Republicans supported mandating body cameras at nearly the same rate as Democratic respondents, 80 percent and 88 percent, respectively.)

Yeah, in response to Lee’s question, it’s really not standard for presidents to use the address to attack the other party. Obama’s 2015 speech was really remarkable because he got a bit salty about Republicans and acknowledged that he hadn’t really done all he set out to do.

This is at least the second time since Derek Chauvin’s conviction that Biden has urged Congress to pass some sort of police reform measure. But any sort of compromise bill between Democrats and Republicans is still in the early stages. The biggest roadblock to getting anything on this done are Republicans, but I’m wondering if having Sen. Scott, the only Black Republican Senator, at the table will lead to any sort of compromise in the near future. (I’m also curious whether Scott will address this in his rebuttal speech.

“White supremacy is terrorism,” says Biden, as he enters the racial justice part of his speech.

Yeah, Lee, I feel like Biden’s approach to “bipartisanship” is basically, “be nice to Republicans but ignore them when it comes to policy.” In comparison to Trump’s rhetoric, that ends up sounding pretty bipartisan.

Lee, I have found Biden’s approach saying “I have the support of Republican VOTERS” to be quite a compelling answer to all the chatter about bipartisanship.

Has any president used the State of the Union to attack the other side, though? Maybe Trump, I guess. But this is usually the medium for outreach to the other side, not attacks.

Biden hasn’t said anything yet in this speech that attacks Republicans. I guess that’s trying to be bipartisan?

Like Alex, I am also not really sure how much Biden’s attempt to recast bipartisanship matters in the grand scheme of things. As Alex said, Republicans are regardless going to try to cast Biden and Democrats as radical and socialist. Republican pollster Bill McInturff recently pointed out that Republicans already strongly disapprove of Biden at a rate similar to how Democrats strongly disapproved of Trump in early 2017, which suggests Republicans may be very motivated to show up in the 2022 midterms. But his polling also revealed something else: Independents are far less likely to disapprove strongly of Biden so far compared to Trump, and I wonder if that’s indicative of the difficulties Republicans will have trying to portray Biden as radical.

Biden spent about 45 minutes on the economy, and he’s moved to foreign policy now. I doubt many Americans not paid to watch this speech will get to the foreign policy part. He really hammered on the economy. As Hakeem said, he also didn’t talk about racial issues in his first 45 minutes. He and his team wanted to talk about the economy and make sure that’s how this speech was defined.

In the grand scheme of things, Sarah, I really don’t think Biden’s efforts to redefine bipartisanship matter that much. No matter what he does, Republicans are going to latch onto things like the cost and size of some of his recent policy proposals to portray him as “too liberal.” (The idea there, of course, is to spark some sort of backlash that will tip Congress in their favor next year.) If Republicans can successfully campaign on Biden being some sort of crazy radical, will his message of bipartisanship really matter?

Biden is now talking about raising the corporate tax rate, something Manchin pushed back on and many Republicans disagree with. One thing Biden campaigned on was a promise to return to an era of bipartisanship and compromise. And yet, as his administration pushes his agenda through Congress, they have tried to define bipartisanship as popular with Republican voters, not congressional Republicans. “If you looked up ‘bipartisan’ in the dictionary, I think it would say support from Republicans and Democrats,” Anita Dunn, a senior Biden adviser told the Washington Post earlier this year. “It doesn’t say the Republicans have to be in Congress.”

What do we make of the Biden administration’s efforts to rebrand “bipartisanship.” Is it smart politics to try and frame bipartisanship in this way? Thus far, Biden is pushing through really popular bills, so does it matter that congressional Republicans aren’t backing it?

Unless I’ve missed it, Biden has yet to talk about voting rights or police violence. And in talking about COVID-19, I don’t think he mentioned overwhelming disparities affecting communities of color or the lack of access of vaccination outlets in many of these communities. Unless there’s a chunk of his speech dedicated to racial inequality, this will be a key criticism of his address in many activist circles on the left. I’m not sure this criticism will matter much as it relates to affecting support among Black Americans, but he’s got a lot to talk about, and we’re almost 45+ mins in.

From “the era of big government is over” to “trickle-down economics has never worked” in 25 years.

On the topic of why Democrats aren’t framing their economic policies in racial terms, I think the results of the affirmative action referendum in California last fall might be somewhat telling. It got a bit lost in the chaos of the 2020 election, but in a highly Democratic, majority-minority state, a push to make affirmative action legal in public colleges and and government failed with 57 percent against, 43 percent for.

Biden did just make a little nod to his disagreements with the party’s left wing, saying he gets into disagreements with his Democratic friends because he thinks you should be able to become a billionaire, as long as you pay your fair share.

To your earlier point, Nathaniel, I think Trump’s successes among non-college-educated white Americans has made it so that when Democrats are appealing to “the middle” or “the other side” they use economic populist terms instead of business friendly terms (like they used to). They stress competition with China instead of global cooperation. Trump changed American politics dramatically and Biden is living in that world. Biden is president, yes, in pat because he was seen a the “blue collar Joe” type. But I think the way he talks about American politics is shaped by Trump’s and Sanders’s successes.

To Sarah and Hakeem’s recent post(s): I found this research paper from political scientists at Yale interesting. Essentially, it says that white Americans are reluctant to endorse policies that achieve racial equality, and that highlighting the benefit of these policies for racial minorities actually undermines support for these policies.

I take it back about FDR: A quick search suggests Truman talked quite a bit about unions, which also makes sense.

Sarah, everything about Biden’s “brand” of Democrat feels strategic to me, including the fact that it’s so hard to pin down. The Democratic party now represents a broad range of political ideologies, which would be represented by two or three parties in another country. Biden has to knit together a lot of competing ideas without sowing further discord. I’m not sure how successful he’ll be able to do that in the long term, but what we’re seeing right now is a difficulty in pinning down where exactly he sits on the spectrum.

Alex, that NBC poll was interesting because it probably is a perfect example of how politicians of color are by default viewed as more liberal than their white counterparts, regardless of what they’ve actually done. As with so much in U.S. politics, public opinion is influenced by race.

Good question, Sarah. We’re 100 days in, and I don’t think there is much agreement about whether Biden is a moderate, a progressive or something else. As Alex mentioned, that recent poll shows us that at the almost-100 day mark Americans perceive Biden as a moderate (more moderate than Obama!), despite Republicans’ best efforts to try and label him as a progressive liberal. Maybe that is their strategy, and it’s working? But it’s worth considering how the fact that he is an older white man contributes to the belief that he is more moderate, despite some of the more progressive actions my colleagues just mentioned.

Sarah, President Biden is getting more progressive in substance — as are a lot of leaders in the Democratic Party — but he’s hasn’t done much to change his image as a moderate. For example, creating a commission to study possible Supreme Court reforms was a good way to stall liberal Democrats’ calls to expand the size of the Supreme Court. And he’s not against completely eliminating the filibuster, either, which is one of the biggest hurdles to getting his agenda items passed.

And most Americans think President Biden is more moderate than Obama was, according to an April NBC poll. In April 2009, NBC found that 59 percent of registered voters saw Obama as “very” or “somewhat” liberal, versus 30 percent who saw him as moderate. For Biden, though, 44 percent saw him as “very” or “somewhat” liberal, while nearly half of voters (42 percent) saw him as “moderate.”

Biden ran as a moderate in the Democratic primary, but has governed surprisingly liberally, or at least far more liberally than say, Obama, given just how far to the left the Democratic Party has moved. But Biden is also still very much trying to walk this fine progressive/moderate line. Do we understand Biden’s ideology? He’s been described as the median democrat, but is it much more than that?

Hakeem mentioned this earlier on the live blog, but at this point, it does seem as if Biden is sidestepping how his policies will disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic Americans. Instead, he’s focusing on just a broader message of economic populism.

In some new work I’ve been doing with Alan Yan, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, we find that most Americans have really tight associations between race and class categories. When Americans see terms “middle class” words like “suburbs,” “vacations” and “mortgage,” they overwhelmingly think of white people. When they see “poor” terms like “broke,” “poverty” and “minimum wage,” they overwhelmingly think of Black people.

It’s interesting to think about how that matters when it comes to Biden and other political elites discussing economic policies.

Lee, my guess is that the last president to talk this positively about unions was maybe FDR, who signed the National Labor Relations Board into existence.

Yes, a lot of economic populism so far. No discussion of racial justice so far.

I don’t know about that, Galen. Biden has been using blue-collar rhetoric like that for decades. I think he’d be talking about the middle class and unions even if Trump hadn’t been president.

This gets back to how Trump has changed the party, and probably Sanders too. There’s lots of populism in this speech so far — Biden reiterates a campaign line, that “Wall Street didn’t build the middle class.” He calls for a $15 minimum wage and stresses terms like “blue collar,” “unions,” “American jobs,” “American products,” “made in America.”

And there’s a shout-out from Biden to raising the minimum wage to $15, something that is broadly popular with many Americans but did not make it into the final coronavirus stimulus package thanks to budget parliamentarian rules and seems unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to get through the Senate.

Lee, maybe Lyndon Johnson?

When was the last time a president talked so favorably about unions in an address?

There is $4 trillion in spending being proposed for Biden. I tend to think that the infrastructure plan, particularly the road building, has a much better chance of becoming law than free community college and other ideas. Manchin seems more excited about the infrastructure part, and he has a ton of power.

“The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America.” That’s a sound bite I bet you’ll hear again.

Biden was just talking about the need to close the digital divide. Millions of Americans still do not have access to high speed internet, which exacerbated inequality during the pandemic as so much of our lives moved online.

It’s true that the American Jobs Plan earmarked $100 billion for broadband funding, but Republicans in the Senate have already cut down a lot of that money in their counter-proposal. Federal funds have been put towards broadband in the past, but haven’t made a lot of progress. Part of this is because of an opaque funding allocation process where the big telecom giants win millions and deliver very little. I’d like to see some specific strategies proposed, including supporting ideas like municipal and community-owned broadband, beyond just throwing money at this problem once again.

Biden is giving some concrete examples of what his $2 trillion infrastructure package would do, such as repair or replace old water pipes. A CBS News/YouGov poll this week found that specific infrastructure fixes like that one are extremely popular (85 percent support) — more so than Biden’s infrastructure plan is in the abstract (58 percent).

Now discussing job creation, Biden acknowledges that women in the workforce have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic.

Yeah, Sarah, it sure looks like presidential approval rating just reflects partisanship now. It’s hard not to notice that Biden’s current approval/disapproval spread (54 percent to 42 percent) is pretty much the mirror image of Trump’s consistent 42 percent approval/54 percent disapproval rating.

It is stunning, Sarah! I’m not sure what a Democratic president could do today to get high marks from people in the opposing party. I wonder if Lee is on to something there. In conservative media, Biden’s accomplishments are not covered, and misinformation about his administration run wild in those social media bubbles. As Geoffrey wrote today, his relatively high approval rating is being driven by near-universal support from Democrats.

So perhaps we should also ask, what could a Democratic president do today to lose the expressed support from people in his own party?

Yeah, Lee. As I wrote earlier today, Biden’s approval rating has the largest average gap between Democrats and Republicans of any recent president in Gallup’s polling over the first 100 days. Biden is only starting out with approval from around 10 percent of Republicans, and it’s hard to see him raising that number significantly.

It is truly remarkable how probably nothing Biden does could win him approval from about a third of the country. If you’re watching conservative media, of course, none of Biden’s accomplishments are getting through. Because of polarization, there’s a real ceiling on Biden’s approval ratings.

Biden is starting with arguably the biggest accomplishment of his administration so far: His handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Americans broadly do give him high marks on that front. But this hasn’t translated to a super high uptick in Biden’s overall approval rating. It sits in the mid-50s right now. Yes, this is higher than Trump’s at this point, but Biden’s approval on his handling of COVID-19 is in the low 60s.

How do we make sense of the difference in how Americans are thinking of Biden’s job performance so far? Isn’t it kind of stunning his overall approval rating isn’t higher?

This is not the same Democratic Party that Trump beat in 2016, and Trump himself played an important role in changing it. The Democratic Party is now more focused on race and populism and has changed how it talks about China. On that last note, Biden just said, “We’re in competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.”

One of the key challenges of vaccinating the entire country is vaccine hesitancy among Republicans. Some social scientists have examined ways to convince Republicans to get the vaccine.

What are the things that work? “Improving public health messaging in general, getting trusted political voices (GOP leaders) to promote vaccination, and getting positive vaccination messages out through nonpolitical messengers. What does not seem to help is having Democratic leaders ask Republicans to get their shot.”

So, it might not matter very much if Biden encourages Republicans to get the vaccine, though he most certainly should.

That’s right, Galen. Multiple polls found around four in five Americans supported the $1,400 direct payments as part of the COVID-19 stimulus bill. It’s hard to find a specific policy proposal where that many Americans are supportive.

Biden has addressed his administration’s successes on vaccine rollout and moves on to the $1,400 stimulus check. Remember, those checks were so popular that both Republicans and Democrats in the Georgia Senate runoffs ran on them, even though McConnell did not support them.

It really can’t be overstated how remarkable this vaccine campaign has been. This isn’t all credit to Biden: There are a lot of moving parts here, and a lot of this was underway before he took office. But to think where we were a year ago, it’s hard to believe what America has achieved.