John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz

Opinion

According to Joe Biden, everything is going great

Since Joe Biden’s finest moments as president have come in the past few weeks — as he’s been a key part of the West’s determination to confront the depredations of Vladimir Putin — it makes sense that the finest moments of his State of the Union address were the ones at the outset in which he discussed the awful events in Ukraine.

Putin, he said, “thought he could roll into Ukraine and the world would rollover. Instead, he met a wall of strength he never imagined. He met the Ukrainian people. From President Zelensky to every Ukrainian, their fearlessness, their courage, their determination, inspires the world.”

His description of the efforts taken against the Russian economy and Russian oligarchs were firm and strong. And he made it “crystal clear the United States and our Allies will defend every inch of territory of NATO countries with the full force of our collective power.”

This firm expression of commitment to the most important alliance in world history after more than a decade of neglect and a certain amount of contempt on the part of his two predecessors was heartening and important.

It was a serious and sober opening. Too bad that so much of the rest of the speech was preposterous.

Did you know that everything in America is just great?

Millions of new jobs (even though we’re still 3 million jobs under the total number before the pandemic)! Wonderful pieces of glorious legislation, including one that will make this the “infrastructure decade!”

Electric cars! Computer chips! And you know all that inflation? That was because “our economy whirred back faster than most predicted”! And it’s mostly because of cars anyway!

President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address during a joint session of Congress in the U.S. Capitol's House Chamber.
During his State of the Union address, President Biden praised the Ukrainian people for their strength against invading forces. Win McNamee/Getty Images

You’d never know this president has an approval rating (according to Real Clear Politics) lower on this date than Donald Trump had the exact comparable day — March 1, 2018. Biden is at 40.6; Trump was at 41.2. That led many concerned Democrats to believe he needed the speech to reset his presidency.

The crisis in Ukraine changed that somewhat, because it has given his presidency a new purpose and direction. But you could see the outlines of the effort to change gears in the surprising passage about policing, in which he made a slight feint toward a Sister Souljah moment in taking on his own radicals.

He spoke movingly about the two young NYPD officers shot in cold blood in January and then insisted that “we should all agree: the answer is not to ‘defund the police.’ The answer is to FUND the police with the resources and training they need to protect our communities.”

Map of where Russia has targeted Ukraine.
Russia has continued to advance and has targeted several points in Ukraine. NY Post composite

Even so, you can tell that Joe Biden thinks his presidency is going swimmingly. His words weren’t defensive. They were triumphalist. He even seemed to promise he would bring the opioid epidemic to an end and, for good measure, would also end cancer “as we know it.”

The immodesty of these ambitions, as we stumble out of the COVID era into an uncertain future in which the dollars in our pocket are worth less every week while Europe faces a continental war and a potential refugee flood of colossal size, had a somewhat delusional aspect.

We’re in an unprecedented crisis abroad, following our unprecedented health crisis over the past two years and an inflationary spiral we haven’t seen the like of in four decades.

Maybe we should, you know, focus on those things.