Phew! Biden Nails It

The president didn’t just clear the senility bar, he demolished it.

Let’s be honest: Before President Biden’s State of the Union address, even millions of Democrats who planned to vote for him thought he wasn’t really up to the job. That was a recipe for despair and eventual defeat.

Now Biden has put those worries to rest, delivering a fiery speech that sets him up to win in November. He can still blow it; the “predecessor” he mentioned 13 times is a formidable campaigner. But the odds of Donald Trump destroying American democracy just went down.

If Biden wins, this speech will be in the history books. The next time he has to perform at this level isn’t until the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago, where he will lead a united Democratic Party (unless, God forbid, they’re still fighting in Gaza). The pressure isn’t likely to be nearly as intense as it was Thursday night.

It wasn’t just the passion and fight he brought to one of the better-crafted SOTUs I’ve seen in the last 40 years, and I’ve watched them all.

It was that Biden proved that he has the strength, endurance, and mental agility to be an effective president. Earlier in the day, Republicans released what seemed to be a devastating short ad showing him stumbling and confused. Then, after the speech, they said he was too intense and aggressive. Which is it, guys?

The president didn’t just clear the senility bar; he demolished it, at least for Democrats and large numbers of independents. Republicans who continue to dwell on his supposed dementia will just be talking to themselves, while the rest of the electorate gets a chance to hear about accomplishments and promises that they haven’t known much, if anything, about (“The greatest comeback story never told.”).

Advantage: Biden.

While a CNN instant poll (not very reliable because it just samples people who watched) showed an impressive 17-point increase in the number of voters who think Biden is taking the country in the right direction, it’s too early to know if the results of head-to-head matchups with Trump will change.

But it’s not too much to say that the campaign has a new frame. Over the next couple of months — when Trump is in a New York courtroom trying to deny he had sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant — Biden will get a second look from voters who may not have watched the speech but hear from virtually everyone that he dramatically exceeded expectations.

Everything clicked, from the contrast on resisting Russian aggression (“Now my predecessor tells Putin, ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’”) at the beginning, to the carefully curated list of hugely popular policies (everything from IVF to HBCUs) in the middle, to his frank discussion of age (“It’s the age of your ideas”) at the end.

But the biggest achievement is that for the rest of the year no one can say he was just reading a speech and is too feeble to think on his feet and lead.

That had been the buzz. Jon Stewart raised a legitimate concern on The Daily Show: If Biden is so on top of his job in private, film it. Prove it.

Last night, the president did, and on two issues that are central to voters.

The first was during the populist part of the speech, which no doubt worked exceptionally well with the non-college and young populist voters he needs to win over and/or motivate.

After explaining how he beat Big Pharma (capping insulin at $35 and negotiating on all the other expensive drugs seniors use) and got rid of ridiculous fees, sweetened by a relatable story about Snickers bars, Biden went right at Trump’s only big legislative win: the massive 2017 tax cut. While describing himself as a capitalist from the most corporate-friendly state in the country, he noted that the 1,000 American billionaires pay an effective rate of 8.2 percent, and he was going to raise their taxes while the other side would lower them yet again.

When Republicans booed, Biden went off-script and ad-libbed:

“Oh, no? Do you guys not want another $2 trillion tax cut? I thought that’s what your plan was.” Touché.

Biden had mastered the GOP at last year’s State of the Union, too, but the stakes were higher this time, and he delivered.

Ahead of the speech, I wasn’t sure he could do so on immigration. Convincing the public that Trump was to blame for the border because he forced the Republicans to kill a bipartisan bill seemed like a bank shot that might not go in the pocket.

It’s not clear yet if Biden managed to cut into Trump’s huge lead on immigration, but I bet that he did. When Biden outlined how tough the bill was, Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, the arch-conservative who negotiated the deal, was caught on camera  nodding and mouthing, “That’s true.”

Biden then ad-libbed to the Republican side of the aisle:

“Oh, you don’t think so? You don’t like that bill?”

As Democrats chanted “Get it done,” Biden made sure to draw the contrast with Trump for viewers who are almost all descended from immigrants: “I will not demonize immigrants by saying, ‘They are poisoning the blood of our country.’”

Then he said to Trump, “Join me,” and he framed the debate just right: “We have a simple choice. We can fight about fixing the border — or we can fix it.”

Early in the speech, it was clear that Democrats felt their man was kicking ass. They began chanting “Four more years!” and kept it up throughout, as the president ended with a nice peroration on “Honesty, decency, dignity, equality.” The afterglow will fade, of course, and Biden and patriotic Americans still have a lot of hard work ahead to win the future. But now, at long last, that work has begun.