Many have pointed out that Joe Biden’s State of the Union address was unlike one anybody — even those without cognitive decline — could recall.
It was loud. It was feisty. It was raucous. It was humorous. It was definitely partisan. It might as well have been a campaign rally, with Democrats jumping to their feet to applaud at every available opportunity. It was Biden the back-slapping pol vs. the highly anticipated and apparently welcomed GOP hecklers, who failed miserably in trying to get under Biden’s skin.
And mostly it was pump-up-the-volume Biden burying the Sleepy Joe trope to the point where, after the speech, Sean Hannity called Biden “Jacked-up Joe,” suggesting that Biden had been, at minimum, “hyper-caffeinated.”
The biggest loser of the night — other than Marjorie Taylor Greene and kitchen-bound Sen. Katie Britt and, mostly, Biden’s “predecessor” — was special counsel Robert Hur, who had infamously and gratuitously described Biden “as a sympathetic, elderly man with a poor memory” in announcing that Biden wouldn’t be prosecuted for his handling of classified documents.
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On Thursday night, Biden came across as a sympathetic, elderly man who could read from a teleprompter for more than an hour — if you think that’s easy, you try it — and, more tellingly, could go off script for ad-libbed banter, which he clearly relished, with his opponents.
Yes, he garbled some words. It’s what Biden does. It’s what he has always done. He talked too fast at times. Yes, he’s always done that, too. He had a bad moment when calling an undocumented immigrant an “illegal.” He coughed more than a few times. And he spoke LOUDLY — as his predecessor might have tweeted — to counter his problems with his sometimes reedy-sounding voice.
But Biden looked strong, meaning not at all frail. He looked confident. He looked comfortable. And that was what he had to do.
Now, all he has to do is do it again. And again. And again. All the way until November.
Whatever anyone says, this one speech, though a huge victory for Biden, won’t change the direction of the Biden-Trump rematch, in which Trump is leading in the polls. What it might do, though, what it might make possible to do, is to start turning the ship around.
The speech was not so much about the state of the union after all, but about the state of Biden. This was Biden’s cognitive test. This was Biden’s person-woman-man-camera-TV test. This was his people-with-cognitive-decline-can’t-do-this test.
He aced it.
I’m not saying Biden is a stable genius. Neither is he. I’m not saying he isn’t old. Neither is he.
I’m not saying that, like most people, I wouldn’t rather have two younger candidates. If Biden’s brain seems fine now, that doesn’t mean it will be when he’s 86 years old at the end of a second term. Look, I’m old myself. I get it.
But younger hardly means better. Did you watch Speaker-for-now Mike Johnson as he sat behind Biden? He clearly did not know what to do. In fact, he seemed completely flummoxed — is that not the perfect word in this instance? — and, as usual, wore an expression like a marionette with its face painted on. If, that is, a face-painted marionette could perform an eye roll.
What I’m saying is that there were at least four Biden moments you should recall from the night to understand what happened.
The first came before the speech when Biden entered the House gallery and was walking toward the lectern. Like all presidents in such moments, he stopped to shake hands with TV-camera-obsessed members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.
That’s when Biden saw MTG — decked out in her, uh, most expressive MAGA ensemble — as she shouted to him, trying to get his attention. Biden looked over to the Jewish-space-laser maven, and, well, just watch the expression. It’s classic.
Biden was, as anyone should be, amused. He loved it. He didn’t say someone should punch Greene. He looked at her, as one pundit put it, as “just a wacky part of life’s rich pageant.”
The second moment came soon into Biden’s speech when he called out his predecessor — Biden never mentioned Trump by name, but did use “my predecessor” 13 times, although he refrained from mentioning any of the 91 felony counts against him — for scuttling the bipartisan border deal, for demonizing migrants for supposedly “poisoning the blood of our country,” for abandoning Ukraine in its time of urgent need, for “bowing” to Vladimir Putin, for trying to rewrite January 6 history, and especially for endangering American democracy.
Citing FDR on World War II and Ronald Reagan on the Cold War, Biden said history was watching America today, with the clear message that the Republican legislators seated before him, particularly those in thrall to his predecessor, were failing history’s test.
(Speaking of tests passed and failed, did Lauren Boebert, who wasn’t dressed in MAGA gear, stay quiet the entire night? Is this a 4th CD campaign strategy — did I just miss her usual trolling? If she didn’t troll, she did manage to tweet. )
The third moment came at the end of the speech when Biden addressed his age. He used humor. And he talked about the other old guy. Biden, as we know, is 81, and Trump is 77, but the polls show that Biden’s age is of far greater concern to voters than Trump’s.
Maybe it’s because when you see Trump, you don’t think of age. You think of a sexual-assaulting fraudster who says he’ll be dictator for only a day.
Here’s Biden:
”I know I may not look like it, but I’ve been around for a while. When you get to be my age, certain things become clearer and clearer. I know the American story. Again and again I’ve seen the contest between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation — between those who want to pull America back to the past and those who want to move America to the future …
“Now some people my age see it differently — (they see) the American story of revenge, resentment and retribution. That’s not me.”
If it’s not Biden, it is his predecessor. And if one of the centerpieces of Trump’s campaign is that Biden is too old — on Thursday, Don Jr. called Biden “a reanimated corpse” — then Biden’s campaign message is this:
“My fellow Americans, the issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are. It’s about how old our ideas are. You can’t lead with ancient ideas that only take us back.”
And a quick fourth moment. When Biden left the podium, he stuck around to hear the praise from his allies and friends in the crowd. He stayed so long that they were dimming the House lights before he left.
One well wisher, Rep. Jerry Nadler, told Biden, “Nobody’s going to talk about cognitively impaired now.”
Biden laughed and then joked, “I kind of wish at times there were cognitive impairment.”
It was funny. And because it was funny, it meant that Biden, for a night anyway, had easily passed the cognition test.
However scrambled Trump’s train of thought might be — and over the next months you’ll have the opportunity to see countless video montages of Trump’s flubs — it’s Biden’s brain that’s on stage.
And that’s where it will remain, even after his successful speech, until at least November 5, Election Day.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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