The NPR Politics Podcast - State Of The Union: Biden Touts Popular, Bipartisan Policies

Episode Date: February 8, 2023

President Biden kept a tight focus on broadly popular policies and bipartisan achievements in a State of the Union address that is likely to serve as a model for his future campaign speeches.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This episode was produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It was edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And the time now is 1138 p.m. Eastern Time on Tuesday, the 7th of February, and President Biden has wrapped up his second State of the Union address. So I've come to fulfill my constitutional obligation to report in the State of the Union. And here's my report. Because the soul of this nation is strong, because the backbone of this nation is strong, because the people of this nation are strong, the State of the Union is strong.

The speech and everything around it, everything happening in that House chamber was an exercise in contrast. President Biden, in his remarks, talked repeatedly about wanting unity and bipartisanship. And to my Republican friends, if we could work together in the last Congress, there's no reason we can't work together and find consensus on important things in this Congress as well. But he also made some jabs and there were loud outbursts from Republicans, you know, putting the realities of partisan division on display for anyone who was watching. But it's being proposed by individuals. I'm not politely not naming them, but it's being proposed by some of you. So, Deirdre, you were in the room. What was it like in there? What was the mood? I feel like there was definitely a big vibe shift from the first section of the speech through the rest of the speech.

At the beginning, when President Biden did make that comment about there's no reason we can't work together, there was bipartisan applause. There was a lot of bipartisan applause about some of the things that Republicans voted with Democrats to pass in the last session of Congress, like infrastructure and a bill promoting the manufacturing of semiconductor chips in the United States. But then really things took a turn. I think once the president started talking about touting his policies in the Inflation Reduction Act, which no Republican voted for, and called for, you know, finishing the job of this big domestic agenda that he's pushing, as we expect him to announce his intentions to run for re-election, you know, the chamber really got the vibe of where we are now, which is divided government. And there was, you know, some heckling at parts in his speech and some, you know, outward displays of people shouting and taking issue with the president of the United States. Yeah, I thought that the president kept his contrasts or attacks on Republicans pretty muted. I'd heard some reporting that Kevin McCarthy had asked him not to refer to ultra-MAGA Republicans, which President Biden has done in several speeches.

He clearly wanted to use the new House Republican majority as a foil. He wants to present himself as kind of a reasonable bipartisan guy who passes all sorts of things that are practical and popular with the American people, as opposed to House Republicans, who he believes are extremists who just fight among themselves. But when he started basically calling out Republicans, and he qualified this, because some of them have presented programs that would sunset Social Security and Medicare. In other words, make Congress vote for them every five years to keep them alive. That's when there was a lot of booing. Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans, some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset.

I'm not saying it's the majority. Let me give you, anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I'll give you a copy. I'll give you a copy of the proposal. That means Congress doesn't vote. Well, I'm glad to see you. I tell you, I'm glad to see you. And I tell you, I enjoy conversion.

The floor turned into kind of the House of Parliament. I mean, it was a lot of, it was a pretty rowdy reception for a State of the Union because this is a vulnerability for Republicans. They have, Kevin McCarthy has said, we're not going to touch a hair on the head of Social Security, but they haven't said what they do want to cut in the debt ceiling talks. They've said they won't raise the debt ceiling unless some kind of spending is cut and they won't say what. So I thought it was a pretty contentious kind of back and forth speech. But the president, I thought, had the upper hand tonight and used the opportunity of having the biggest bully pulpit of them all pretty well. So, Mara, you had been saying that President Biden didn't like explicitly

criticize ultra MAGA Republicans or even use that phrase in a way that he has in other speeches, but he definitely got his digs in in a way that, you know, he didn't explicitly call Republicans in the chamber hypocrites, like this moment when he was touting the bipartisan infrastructure law. I want to thank my Republican friends who voted for the law and my Republican friends who voted against it as well. But I'm still, I still get asked to fund the projects in those districts as well, but don't worry. I promised I'd be a president for all Americans. We'll fund these projects, and I'll see you at the groundbreaking. Some Republicans voted for it, as he said, and some Republicans who voted against it still wanted to take credit for all the wonderful

projects that it funds in their district. So it was a little obscure, I think, for people who haven't been following every twist and turn of this. But he said, basically, don't worry, you can still come to the groundbreaking, as many Republicans who voted no still do. And I thought, you know, that was a little bit of humor. I thought the president was enjoying himself tonight. Making long speeches is not his forte. But I thought that one of his goals was to look vigorous, robust, and not super old, which is one of the biggest problems he has convincing voters, including Democrats, that he should be the president for a second term. The majority of Democrats in polls say they wish there was somebody else who would be their nominee in 2024. But I thought he used

the opportunity well, and he looked in pretty good shape. He definitely looked like he was having a good time. And I think he also started out his speech trying to tout this bipartisanship, this bipartisan record. He singled out both Democratic and Republican leaders and said he looked forward to working with them. I think he was trying to extend an olive branch in the first section of his speech, talking about the bipartisan accomplishments and then trying to pick some areas where he thought that they might be able to find some common ground going forward. But then the rest of his speech really turned into a wish list of all the policies, mostly domestic policies, that he knows that

Republicans on Capitol Hill are not likely to vote for. That's a really, really important point. This is not an effort to try to pass legislation. That was the first two years. That's why the White House pushed so hard, because they knew that they might lose one or both houses of Congress in the midterm. This was a messaging bill. The proposals that he put forward, like Deirdre said, he knows they're not going to get through Congress, but they are very popular either with Democrats or with independent voters. And he wants to make sure that everyone knows he's for them and the Republicans are against them. All right, we're going to take a quick break. We'll have more in a second. And we're back. And one of the set pieces of a State of the Union address is the First Lady's box in the House chamber and the guests who are invited

to sit there. They offer to deliver emotional touch points during these addresses. And President Biden spoke directly to the parents of Tyree Nichols. His mother and stepfather were there. Nichols is the man who was brutally beaten by Memphis police last month and died from his injuries. All of us in this chamber, we need to rise to this moment. We can't turn away. Let's do what we know in our hearts that we need to do. Democrats who have been trying to do something on police reform, and they haven't been able to get it together. They haven't been able to reach agreement. They haven't. And that's when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. I mean, in divided government, it gets even tougher. I will say that that moment was one of the most emotional and compelling moments

inside the House chamber. All of the lawmakers on the House floor stood and looked at Tyree Nichols' family and applauded. And his mother seemed to mouth, I think it was please, or she sort of gestured to them after he said, do something. She pointed to the lawmakers like it's on you kind of. And I think people felt her pain and her appeal to them. But I think in terms of where the rubber meets the road, in terms of what Republicans in the House or getting 60 votes in the Senate looks like, it's not the kind of police reform bill that Democrats put together after the murder of George Floyd that's named after him. That's the sort of starting point that a lot of Democrats want to push again on. I think there is a

realization that in divided government, it would have to be a sort of stripped down version of that bill that might just focus on training and resources to departments and some sort of federal standards around police conduct. But I think the reality is it's just not a big priority for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Right. And that was the big difference in tonight's speech is right behind the president, no longer Speaker Pelosi, but Speaker Kevin McCarthy. And that shift in the power dynamics was on display and also in sort of the mood in the chamber. I want to turn to the Republican response. It was provided by this year by Arkansas governor and former Trump White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. President Biden and I don't have a lot in common. I'm for freedom. He's for government control. At 40, I'm the youngest governor in the country. And at 80, he's the oldest president in American history. I'm the first woman to lead my state.

And he's the first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is. I think that Sarah Huckabee Sanders speech was tailored to a Republican primary electorate, the Republican base. Usually the responses are a great platform, an opportunity for an up-and-coming person of the opposite party, in this case Republicans, to showcase themselves. And I think that's what she was doing. And it was interesting that what she chose to do was something so hard right and red meat that she believes that the appeal of that kind of scorched earth Trumpian rhetoric, American carnage, really, she talked about how, you know, the country was a mess and Joe Biden was unfit, is still really, really appealing and very compelling to Republicans. That's what her response told me. You know, one thing that jumped out from

Sanders' response was that she did tell some stories about her time as part of the Trump administration, though she didn't mention his name. And at one point she said, you know, a new generation of Republican leaders are ready to step up. Well, I thought she threaded that needle pretty well. On the one hand, she gave the message new generation of Republican leaders. There is a big majority of Republican leaders and elected officials who want to move on from Donald Trump. There's also a lot of Republican voters who want to move on. But she also told a very emotional story about going to visit troops in Iraq with the president, with Donald Trump, without ever mentioning his name. But she talked about how they were so thrilled to see him and it was so moving. So I thought that part of the speech was for the audience of one, for Donald J. Trump himself, so he wouldn't feel slighted or somehow dissed by the rest of her

speech. So we've been thinking about the president's speech as sort of a soft launch for President Biden's expected reelection campaign. And there was this part of the speech that stood out as what I took to be his message to Trump voters. So many of you felt like you've just simply been forgotten. Amid the economic upheaval of the past four decades, too many people have been left behind and treated like they're invisible. And then he argued that his economic policies, things like the Chips and Science Act, infrastructure legislation, bringing money into not just the coast, but to parts of America that he says have been forgotten. Is that the kind of message that a re-election campaign is made of?

Well, that is the bet he's making. And that's what's so interesting. He has chosen the kitchen table over the culture war. And he believes that if he can do specific, helpful, practical things for ordinary middle class, blue collar families, they'll reward him. And I don't know if that's true anymore in American politics. You know, Steve Bannon, the kind of Trump guru for a while, said politics is downstream from culture. And Republicans, you heard it in Sarah Huckabee Sanders' response, have clearly chosen the culture war. But Joe Biden focused most of his speech on kitchen table issues. He said this was a blue collar blueprint to rebuild America. He really likes that letter B alliteration,

kind of like build back better. He sure does. I mean, I think one of the issues that you didn't hear a lot about in this speech was abortion, which I think a lot of Democrats thought that issue helped them do better than they were expected to do in the midterm elections. The president did vow if Republicans tried to pass a national abortion ban, he would veto it. But he didn't really talk that much about the issue. And I think that, like Mara said, he made a calculated decision to focus on kitchen table issues and to finish the job on some of these policies like the child tax credit or, you know, more child care programs or additional health care benefits. Lowering the cost of insulin for all.

Right. A lot of things that he knows he can't pass through this Congress, but that he is putting out there to say, give me another term and I'll finish the job on this broad domestic policy agenda that he laid out when he originally ran for president. And I think he decided that that was what most Americans would be focused on. And we'll see whether that bears out. I think Joe Biden said finish the job more times tonight even than he said folks. And he said that a lot. All right, that is it for today.

We will be back in your feeds at the regular time on Wednesday. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I cover Congress. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.