Biden’s first speech to Congress lacked predecessors’ drama

Make sense of what matters most in Washington. |

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

The D.C. Brief By Philip Elliott Washington Correspondent, TIME Biden Reaches the Summit of American Power in a Way Never Imagined A President’s joint address to Congress is typically a hectic evening on Capitol Hill. Every member of Congress jams in the second-floor House chamber. Their family members, constituents and, yes, sometimes donors cram into the chamber’s third-floor balcony seats that make Broadway theaters seem gracious in their spacing. Lawmakers get to the chamber early to position themselves along the central aisle so they can have a few seconds of face-time with the President — and get in the camera shots that go to millions of TVs live. As one veteran Republican operative joked last night, “It’s weird watching a State of the Union address and not seeing the whole ‘Sheila Jackson Lee got her seat at 7:24 AM’ thing.” Even in an era of change, some things are constant. But with seven of every eight seats in the chamber sitting empty last night, the press balcony practicing social distancing and masks still de rigueur, President Joe Biden’s first turn pitching from that joint session was one for the history books. We all knew it would be nuisance and not a novelty. In seats that were off-limits, bands of tape advised no-sitting to remind guests to stay in the spot carrying their name card. Even among Biden’s partisan loyalists, it was some of the thinnest applause I’ve heard in 20 years of covering the annual speech in person and from afar, dating back to sitting in the gallery for the first one of these George W. Bush gave in a pre-9/11 United States. With fewer members physically present to absorb the sound, every noise registered on the mics. Watching at home on television, every mumble — or in the case of Colorado’s Lauren Boebert, the unfurling of a silver blanket meant to troll Democrats about the children laying under them in refugee camps along the U.S.-Mexican border — was audible. No one struggled to discern any outburst like Republican Rep. Joe Wilson’s 2009 scream at Obama during such a session: “You lie!” An errant cell phone last night became a Twitter whodunnit. (Side note: We are all pretty sure we know.) Where Biden’s predecessors of both parties treated the evening as a performance to be judged by how often people rose from their chairs, interrupted with applause and for how long, last night had none of that. His speechwriter Vinay Reddy and longtime strategist Mike Donilon didn’t leave breadcrumbs for raucous Pavlovian responses. And Biden, for his part, seemed indifferent to his audience’s reactions. He seemed to take the sparse clapping in stride and the smaller audience as an invitation to, at some points, stray from the prepared text. If anything, the lack of unscheduled interruptions helped Biden in ways most Americans may not have recognized. A stutterer since childhood, Biden doesn’t do well with interruption or surprises. When he starts a sentence, either he drives through to the end or he gets tongue-tied. That struggle has been a feature of his speeches on the Senate floor and on the world stage. The fear of stumbling at the Iowa State Fair in 1987 mid-White House run probably led him to plagiarism more than any intent to steal the words he had used plenty of times before with attribution. Spontaneity is not Biden’s friend. Indeed, you could see times when both Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi caught themselves starting to clap before remembering not to mess with their friend’s cadences. They’d get out of the chair only to wait for Biden’s teleprompters to pause. They didn’t want to knock him off his pace. A year ago, Pelosi marked the end of what might have been Trump’s final turn in that chamber with derision and a ripped-in-two copy of the speech. Last night, she bumped elbows with the President of her party only after he had driven to the end of his final sentence and parked the cart. As Biden stood at the rostrum last night, it was a reality imagined since at least the 1960s. Biden had a chance to flex. And he did. I’ll leave it to my colleagues to highlight his ideas on policies and politics that flowed from this hour-long speech that will be remembered as much for its novel staging as its high-spending ambition . But nothing can deny this truth: this is not how Biden ever imagined climbing the steps to perhaps the most iconic podium in American politics. Once summoned, he didn’t exactly mimic his predecessors.   Share this newsletter

Here's what else we're watching in Washington Tim Scott's Response to Biden The rising star in Republican politics takes his invitation to rebut Biden not to highlight his central role in negotiating what could be a landmark criminal-justice compromise but to retreat to political attacks. As The Washington Post reports, the strategy seems aimed more at hobbling Biden than advancing a deal that could lay the groundwork for Scott’s own presidential aspirations. Read More » Solving the Southern-Border Crisis With Trees In a novel move, Mexico’s President proposes a plan to plant trees in Northern Triangle countries to stem the flow of migrants marching through his country en route to the U.S. As TIME’s Ciara Nugent reports, linking the border crisis with climate change policies might be smart policy as well as wide politics. Read More » Smirking Moscow Russia pulls back its military exercises from its border with Ukraine, leaving Kiev, Washington and other Western capitals breathing a shallow sigh of relief. But as TIME’s Ian Bremmer writes, the West shouldn’t get too complacent or believe that Vladimir Putin won’t again turn to belligerence to suggest he’s in stronger shape than he actually is. Read More » Democrats Need to Dodge Wokeness… Veteran strategist James Carville warns his fellow Democrats that they’re falling into a trap of speaking like Twitter if they do nothing but use buzzwords appealing to the most socially awakened people in their orbits. In a conversation with Vox, Carville says Democrats will lose if their appeal to wokeness is at the expense of the people he recruited to put Bill Clinton in the White House back in the ‘90s. Read More » … While Wall Street Can't Afford to be Sleepy “Woke Capitalism,” as a New York Times opinion writer notes, may be convenient but it’s also amoral. It can make political sense in the short term, but it might be unworkable forever. Just look at Amazon: it wants people to vote but not to unionize.   Read More »

Want more from TIME? Sign up for our other newsletters. Subscribe to TIME

TIME may receive compensation for some links to products and services in this email. Offers may be subject to change without notice.   Connect with TIME via Facebook | Twitter | Newsletters   UPDATE EMAIL     UNSUBSCRIBE    PRIVACY POLICY   YOUR CALIFORNIA PRIVACY RIGHTS   TIME Customer Service, P.O. Box 37508, Boone, IA 50037-0508   Questions? Contact politics@time.com   Copyright © 2021 TIME USA, LLC. All rights reserved.