Sorry State Of The President: What Biden Must Do Thursday Night

A caveat to start: this correspondent believes the fix is in for November. Despite this week’s Supreme Court decision on Colorado’s attempted ballot-cleansing, Democrats, if anything, will improve on their election-rigging methodology.

Moreover, the corrupt criminal class occupying Washington has thoroughly inoculated itself from effective challenges with its “insurrection” and “Big Lie” narratives and total weaponization of the justice system. In particular: the strong likelihood that at least one Trumped-up trial for cooked-up crimes facing The Donald will be underway for election season.

Were 2024 a conventional election, near-catastrophic news from surveys on the eve of Thursday’s State of the Union address would raise the stakes to almost unimaginable levels for even a leader with exceptional political instincts, superb speaking skills, and a completely sound mind. And President Joseph Robinette Biden has never (even prior to his precipitous cognitive decline) been accused of any of the above.

The problem isn’t headline numbers showing Donald Trump leading by narrow margins. The time bombs Biden must defuse – starting, if possible, in the upcoming joint congressional session – hide deep in the crosstabs of a recent New York Times/Sienna survey.

Age. It’s not just that three in four respondents believes Biden is “too old to be an effective president.” It’s that an amazing, astounding and, for the incumbent, potentially annihilating 63% of 2020 Biden voters think so.

A perspective surely supercharged by a special counsel’s conclusion that the president is too mentally infirm to face trial for squirreling classified documents in open boxes, and the inexplicably nutso decision to put the foggy, ill-prepared usurper-in-chief before a rabid press corps to deny it.

What Biden must do Thursday: Clearly, come across as vigorous and in full control of his faculties, as he somehow managed last year. In addition to a nap and a full dose of any medication he’s speculated to be on, for such an event it’s critical to scour and excise the slightest syllable that causes the “talent” to stumble in rehearsal. Before this large an audience under current perceptions, the Delawarean simply can no longer afford any of the slips, slurs, and word salads characterizing other public appearances.

It might further keep Biden fresh if he took some advice offered in 2023: make his best points and get off the podium. While these pages this week served up a brilliant excerpt from Ronald Reagan’s nearly hour-and-a-half 1987 SOTU, a better model is The Gipper’s 1986 address, which weighed in at a crisp, crowd-pleasing 29 minutes 50 seconds.

It’s the Stupid Economy. Three related number sets leap from the NYT survey:

• A majority of every subgroup – including women (more than men), blacks, Democrats and once again, 2020 Biden voters – rated “economic conditions” to be “only fair” or “poor.”
• By a more than 2-to-1 margin (40% to 18%), overall respondents believe Biden’s policies hurt them versus helping them. More ominous for Biden, across all demographic subsamples, pluralities of respondents believe Trump’s policies helped them versus hurting them. In all, more than twice as many voters sampled favored The Orange Man’s outcomes.
• Respondents massively believe America is headed in the wrong direction across all demographic subgroups – and yes, even a plurality of Biden voters falls into that camp.

What Mr. Biden must do Thursday: Come clean. As demonstrated on these pages, Americans simply aren’t buying Democrats’ sunny recitation of ostensibly robust economic reports voters supposedly haven’t noticed. They’re living the underlying, everyday realities: struggling paycheck-to-paycheck with pockets of still popping prices on necessities (prime example: insurance) and Kellogg’s CEO suggesting beleaguered families make do with cereal for dinner. Along with high interest rates putting housing out of reach and millennials and Gen Zers, especially college grads, underemployed.

Biden must acknowledge these realities, shoulder an appropriate measure of the blame instead of pointing the finger at Republicans and Big Business (more on this below), and at least attempt to lay out adjustments providing a credible pathway to a brighter future.

Mr. Nice Guy No More? A final disturbing trend for the Democratic standard-bearer is the growing sense that he lacks “the personality and temperament to be an effective president” – with women in particular now essentially split on the issue. Relentless attacks regarding “MAGA Republicans,” “insurrectionists,” “white supremacists,” “assaults on/threats to democracy” and “dictatorship” have taken their toll on the everyman, “uniter-in-chief” image he once cultivated. Not to mention his administration’s continual gaslighting of the public on issues like the economy, border security, and DEI.

What Mr. Biden must do Thursday: Soften the rhetoric. His baiting of Republicans made for some amusing exchanges last year. But Snarly Joe must send biting attack politics the way of Commander, the erstwhile First Pet, resurrect the likeable Scranton Joe persona and suggest common ground for cooperation with his opposition – and not just the malleable Uniparty elements.

Good luck in all these areas, Mr. Biden. We’ll be back Friday morning to review just where you made the grade – and didn’t.

Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.