Biden’s Pitch to the Nation

On March 7, President Joe Biden gave his 2024 State of The Union Address to Congress. In his speech he sought to contrast between himself against former President Trump and the Democratic Party he leads while also making a case for how his agenda has improved the lives of Americans.

Biden’s address was very similar to his 2023 version, emphasizing many of the same points. Both speeches featured issues such as democracy at home and abroad, the federal government’s budget deficit, raising taxes on the wealthy, government healthcare programs, regulating “junk” fees, and reproductive rights.

I’ve only been watching the SOTU speeches for a couple of years, but what you need to understand about them is they are intended to discuss the main problems the country faces and present a vision for its future. They were originally meant to influence Congress, but since the speeches started being broadcast by cable news channels they are now designed explicitly to also directly message voters.

The special guests highlighted are usually people who that president thinks are examples of admirable traits or have experienced challenges, and their stories are contextualized as either examples of how their administration’s policies are working or compelling reminders of problems that Congress needs to fix. This year Biden invited the prime minister of Sweden, and an Alabama mother who currently cannot access in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to help her and her husband have another child, because of a ruling by that state’s supreme court, which categorized embryos as children. He also

mentioned Kate Cox, a mother from Texas who was prohibited by state legislation from having an abortion for medical reasons and had to leave the state to seek one.

FOREIGN POLICY

In his address, Biden made a direct comparison of Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler by referencing a SOTU address made by President Franklin Roosevelt back when “Hitler was on the march” and “war was raging in Europe,” he said.

Biden asserted that just like Hitler after his initial push, Putin would not stop after invading Ukraine. “Putin of Russia is on the march invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond,” he said. “If anyone in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.”

Biden said if Russia’s takeover of Ukraine succeeds, a much larger conflict with The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is likely. Then he referenced a recent quote from a Trump campaign event where the ex-president said that he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries if they didn’t “(p)ay your bills.” (The latter quote is likely in reference to the 2014 Defense Investment Pledge made by NATO defense ministers which sets a goal for each member nation to commit spending 2 % of their Gross Domestic Product on their defense budget.)

Meantime, additional U.S. funding for Ukraine’s resistance has been blocked by the U.S. House Republican leadership. When Biden described how additional U.S. military aid to Ukraine was being help up, he said, “(A)ssistance to Ukraine is being blocked by those who want to walk away from world leadership” and would instead pursue an isolationist foreign policy.

Heading into the March 7 address, the backdrop of the Israeli military operation in Gaza would hang heavily over the whole evening, with various groups waiting to see how Biden would talk about the conflict. The activist group “Jewish Voice for Peace” even attempted to physically block his path to address Congress, to pressure the president to call for an immediate cease-fire in the Gaza strip.

When Biden did bring up the Gaza crisis, he committed to bringing home the Israeli hostages taken by the Palestinian Hamas leadership and called for a six-week “immediate cease fire … to get all the prisoners released” – after previously having refrained from calling for a cease-fire.

DOMESTIC POLICY During Biden’s speech, Democratic women senators and representatives in the audience wore white, as they have in previous years as a symbol of women’s suffrage. This year, the white was symbolically in support of reproductive rights. Biden credited the U.S. Supreme Court last June overturning the precedent set by Roe v. Wade, an historic ruling that put limits on how much abortion could be restricted, with the Democratic party’s success recent elections since.

Various ballot measures, either to restrict and expand reproductive rights, went in favor of keeping access to abortion available. Some have suggested Congress could pass nationwide abortion restrictions; Biden declared, “If Congress passes a national ban, I will veto it,” and that conversely, he would sign legislation that codifies the reproductive rights established by Roe v. Wade

Biden also reiterated any attempts by Congress to trim Social Security or Medicare benefits, telling the assembled lawmakers, “I will stop you!”