Biden – still old! – breathes fire, speaks truth and has fun with his hecklers at SOTU | Opinion
Editor’s note: Kansas City Star Opinion writers watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night and gave their own perspectives. Read David Mastio’s column here. — Yvette Walker
In the first season of what was then “NBC’s Saturday Night” and later became “Saturday Night Live,” comedian Chevy Chase did this running joke about how the media hammers some stories until they’re pulverized, and even then won’t stop.
That was 1975, the year the Spanish dictator Franco died, after weeks of regular news reports that he was still barely alive. “And in tonight’s top story,” SNL’s original “Weekend Update” anchor would say, “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!”
That’s how I’ve felt for a while about the maddeningly one-note, Page One coverage of our president: Joseph R. Biden is still old!
The man has done a truly Rooseveltian job in his first term, amid multiple five-alarm blazes: He’s walked our economy from hell back to health and pushed through a massive infrastructure program while also dealing with multiple wars, an increasingly isolationist Congress and a shocking percentage of the public tempted by fascism. In so many ways, we have been here before.
Yet conservative media has never stopped trying to make the man look like he can no longer dress himself. Then the rest of us, in trying to show how evenhanded we are, began doing muted versions of the same story, only posed as a question: Can Joe Biden still dress himself?
Why yes, it turns out. At Thursday night’s State of the Union, he came out breathing fire, seemed to enjoy giving it right back to his hecklers and may still be hanging out in the Capitol for all I know, shaking hands with the midnight janitorial crew.
“I may not look like it, but I’ve been around awhile,” he told the Congress and the country. “When you get to be my age, you’ve seen a few things,” and know what matters — freedom and democracy most of all — and core values like honesty, decency and dignity.
“Other people my age see it differently,” he said, smiling.
Since being elected to the U.S. Senate at only 29, he said, he’s been called both too young and too old, “but whether young or old, I’ve always known what endures. … The very idea of America, that we are all created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout our lives. We’ve never fully lived up to that idea, but we’ve never walked away from it, either, and I won’t walk away from it now. The issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are, it’s how old our ideas are. Hate, anger, revenge, retribution are among the oldest.”
With House Speaker Mike Johnson smirking over his shoulder — at one point, Vice President Kamala Harris had to arch an eyebrow in Johnson’s direction even to get him to his feet to acknowledge the late civil rights icon John Lewis — Biden owned the room and made those yelling who knows what look small.
Echoed FDR’s call to ‘wake up the Congress’
I’ve written before about how unworried I am about Biden’s strength of purpose, and have compared him to his undemocratic rival I don’t know how many times.
But on the night of his SOTU, I wanted to say why I think this president has accomplished what no one else could have in his first term, and why I’m not wishing anyone else were the ‘24 nominee, either, even if others do walk and talk faster and look better.
He is a survivor in so many ways — the last, it seems, of a certain kind of American politician, with deep experience in both foreign and domestic policy and deep faith in our better angels.
He righted a capsized federal government, and achieved what others have only talked about for decades just in making insulin affordable and capping credit card fees. A voice of reason in an unreasonable time, he has actually managed to govern in an age of intentional chaos; who else could have done that?
At the same time, his Joey from Scranton regular-guyness sets him apart, and his heart-on-his-sleeve humanity is what we need so much more of in public life. Whether he’s talking about his own family or yours, don’t you get the feeling he actually likes them? He’s working his elderly rear end off for you, no matter who you are or what you think of him.
He began his address by citing FDR’s 1941 State of the Union, intended to “wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary moment,” just as this one is not.
“Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today. What makes this moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack, both at home and overseas, at the very same time.”
“If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not. Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself.”
He at least attempted to shame the smirking speaker and other cowards who in keeping that from happening have already cost some of our Ukrainian allies their lives: “But now assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk away from our leadership in the world. It wasn’t that long ago when a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, thundered, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ Now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, ‘Do whatever the hell you want.’”
Biden’s message to Putin is a little different, he said: “We will not walk away. We will not bow down. I will not bow down.”
Of the threat to democracy here, he spoke about Jan. 6, and how “we all saw with our own eyes these insurrectionists were not patriots. … My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6th. I will not do that. This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. And here’s the simple truth: You can’t love your country only when you win.”
He laid out our choices, and I am not at all torn about mine.
This story was originally published March 8, 2024 at 6:02 AM.
