AMAC Exclusive – By Shane Harris
In less than two weeks, President Joe Biden is slated to give his second State of the Union Address in what will be a pivotal moment of his presidency and potential reelection bid. The narrative Biden’s camp will likely try to push is that it is congressional Republicans who are being unreasonable for not embracing every policy Democrats suggest. But the version of “bipartisanship” that Biden will ask for in order to break the “partisan gridlock” is one where both parties obediently accept the edicts emanating from the Oval Office.
Both the substance of Biden’s remarks on February 7 and the media’s reaction to them will provide critical insights into the direction of the 2024 presidential race and the rest of Biden’s term as well. If Biden is going to make an attempt to turn his presidency around and flip the script on his catastrophic first two years in order to make the case for another four, it will have to begin with his State of the Union Address.
Biden’s speech on the border earlier this month and sudden focus on “border security” likely provides a glimpse into what this shift will look like. After refusing to travel to the border and denying that there was even a problem at all, Biden suddenly decided the crisis was worth his attention. He announced several executive actions which he pretended were aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration – but which in fact amounted to a new amnesty plan. He then attempted to pin blame for the border crisis on congressional Republicans, who had just spent two years trying to force the administration to fix the disaster that Democrat policies had created.
Americans can expect a similar play from Biden when he takes the podium for the State of the Union. Facing a new Republican House and a desperate need to resurrect his image with the American people, Biden will feign a desire for bipartisanship while also shirking blame for the many crises his stubborn refusal to engage in bipartisanship has created.
Just as the border crisis is supposedly not Biden’s fault but rather the result of a “broken immigration system,” and just as high gas prices are allegedly not a result of Biden’s sabotaging of the American energy sector but rather the war in Ukraine, so too will the president claim that every other problem facing the country is the fault of congressional Republicans, who just took power a few weeks ago.
But in order to have any hope of pulling off such a messaging scheme, Biden will need the acquiescence of his longtime allies in the media and the Democratic establishment – something that may not be 100 percent assured.
The rest of the Democratic ecosystem is also at a critical juncture in the lookahead to 2024. With Biden now increasingly hinting that he plans to mount a bid for a second term, the mainstream media in particular has shown signs that they may not be willing to drag Biden across the finish line as they did in 2020.
In the fallout from the classified documents scandal, several normally friendly outlets have run pieces critical of Biden. The Washington Post pointedly noted the “pitfalls” of the White House’s strategy to deal with the fiasco. The New York Times ran a headline that Biden “miscalculated” in his response to the revelations. Maureen Dowd, also of the Times, even floated the idea that some Democrats may be “rethinking” a Biden 2024 run in an interview with Nancy Pelosi.
Those criticisms continue a not-so-subtle pattern that began emerging last year. In July, a New York Times opinion piece openly stated that “Joe Biden is too old to be president again.” CNN’s Van Jones and Don Lemon both explicitly questioned Biden’s fitness for office on air last June. Other attacks on President Biden that were previously confined to conservative platforms have also begun appearing in liberal outlets. New York Magazine, for example, published a piece last September on “The sordid saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
The media reaction to Biden’s State of the Union Address will provide perhaps the clearest sign yet of how the Fourth Estate might look to shape the 2024 race. If they respond with the over-the-top gushing about Biden’s speech like in 2021 and 2022, praising it as “great” and “unifying,” it is likely that they are fully invested in a Biden 2024 bid.
However, if the reaction is much more muted, and words like “old” and “frail” are used to describe the address, it will be the media’s signal to Biden that he has lost their backing.
Even without the media’s support, Biden may not be deterred from another presidential run. After all, serious questions about his mental fitness and ability to campaign did not deter him in 2020. But without the excuse of a pandemic to hide in his basement and absent the allegiance of the media class, Biden may suddenly find himself facing a rather difficult road back to the White House.
Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @Shane_Harris_.
