President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address Thursday night is his first major election speech of the 2024 campaign. Yes, he’s the president and he’s giving the speech in his official capacity, not at a campaign rally. But the power of incumbency is that you get to make your pitch to the nation in front of all the major networks, with the U.S. Congress as your backdrop. There are important governing imperatives for Biden in this speech — pushing the House to take up the aid package for Ukraine and Israel passed by the Senate and laying out the framework for funding the government through the rest of the year, to name a few. But it’s worth thinking about this particular State of the Union through an explicitly re-election-related lens.
The power of incumbency is that you get to make your pitch to the nation in front of all the major networks, with the U.S. Congress as your backdrop.
The Biden record on domestic policy, particularly economic management and investment, remains underpublicized, underrecognized by the public and wildly impressive. With tens of millions of voters watching, Thursday would be a good time to run through the many popular programs and achievements that make up that record.
The Biden presidency has overseen strong job creation and consistently low unemployment. Wage inequality is going down. Real wages are up. The U.S. economy has the highest growth rate of any peer country in the G7 and the lowest inflation of those peer countries.
Small-business applications are booming, and the IRS is catching more tax cheats, recouping millions. Manufacturing investment has exploded, helping areas that have been hit hard by deindustrialization.
A record number of people signed up for health insurance via the Affordable Care Act in 2024. Crime and disorder, which spiked during the pandemic, are receding. Homicides rocketed during Trump’s last year in office by the largest one-year percentage increase in a generation — bit it’s…
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