The State of the Union address is technically an update on the status of the country, not a political speech.
But much of Tuesday’s speech was also about President Joe Biden’s political thinking – at least, that’s how the author of this new book on the president sees it.
“This was the first speech of his reelection campaign,” Chris Whipple, author of “The Fight of his Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House,” told Spectrum News. “He’s clearly running.”
We don’t yet know for sure if President Biden is running for re-election. In fact, he told “PBS Newshour” in a post-State of the Union interview that he still has not made a decision on whether he will run in 2024, but is leaning in that direction.
“I haven’t made that decision,” Biden told Judy Woodruff. “That’s my intention, I think. But I haven’t made that decision firmly yet.”
But for more clues, note that the first stop on Biden’s post-State of the Union blitz was Wisconsin, a perennial battleground state.
Plus, Tuesday night Biden seemed to display his intentions with a dozen variations of three words: “Finish the job.”
Biden echoed that message in his next stop on Thursday in Tampa, Fla., where the president highlighted on his efforts to protect Medicare and Social Security – a central theme of his 2022 midterm campaign, which saw Democrats outperform expectations – and lower health care costs for Americans.
To Biden’s critics, finishing the job means more wild spending, an unprotected border – and more limits on guns to boot.
“While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” said Arkansas Gov. Sarah Sanders, the former Trump White House press secretary, in her rebuttal to the State of the Union.
Of course, the White House sees it differently: Biden is signaling a run on preserving democracy, as well as popular pocketbook issues, like eliminating “junk” fees.
Whipple says “finishing the job” also fits neatly into Biden’s willingness to be underestimated.
“I’m the guy who told you I was going to get bipartisan legislation passed two years ago,” Whipple said of Biden’s thinking. “You thought I was smoking something then, now you know I delivered and I’m not finished.”
To be sure, to “finish the job” may refer to the work of the next two years.
But with Republicans holding the House of Representatives after last year’s midterms, there’s only so much that’s realistic.
Then there’s the inescapable question about the irreversible: Biden would be 86 at the close of a second term. But Whipple says that may not be an issue inside the president’s orbit.
“My assessment based on talking to almost all of his inner circle is that Joe Biden is is up to it,” Whipple said. “He’s 80 years old, and obviously that’s a legitimate issue and it’s something that voters should decide, but from what I can gather, Joe Biden is is firing on every cylinder.”
