Former president Donald Trump on the campaign trail. (Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images) 
It’s gloves off. It is time for the knuckle dusters and gut punches in a presidential and general election campaign that is now (nearly) officially under way. We say, “nearly”, because the country’s primary elections are not yet completed, let alone the national political party nominating conventions, and lightning could still strike – although it now is extremely unlikely.
The plain fact is Republicans have made their choice to renominate the former president, Donald Trump, in the aftermath of his overwhelming success during the Super Tuesday primary voting on 5 March. Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, beaten at those polls in every contest save in Vermont, suspended her campaign, but she declined to offer an endorsement of her rival.
Just before the voting, Trump received a gift from the Supreme Court that had ruled individual states cannot bar challenger Trump from appearing on their respective ballots (in the US,voting is under the control of individual states, not an IEC-style body) for the November election; this, despite charges Trump that incited an insurrection at the Capitol Building on 6 January 2021, and was thus ineligible to be a candidate, in accord with Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the country’s constitution.
Among Democrats, meanwhile, the incumbent president, Joe Biden, has been clearing the decks of his party’s primaries. Although, here, a protest vote over US policies in the Near East has meant a discernible percentage of voters in several states have chosen to vote “uncommitted” rather than for the president.
Then, on Thursday evening, the incumbent president delivered his best punch yet in the constitutionally required “state of the union” message. For many years, this report was delivered as a written letter to Congress. But for a century now, it has been a moment for presidents to set out their successes, their challenges, and their promises and hopes. Now it is a widely viewed event, broadcast live on television and live-streamed to millions at home – and abroad.
On Thursday night, Biden delivered his state of the union speech before both houses of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, military leaders, the cabinet (minus one designated survivor sitting elsewhere in the event of an unimaginable disaster), and invited guests who were symbolic of the various key points of the speech. This speech has effectively become Biden's first avowed campaign speech for the present electoral cycle.
Pro-Gaza ceasefire demonstrators in downtown Washington DC had forced the presidential motorcade to take a detour from the White House to the Capitol Building, although there was no attempt by protestors to enter the Capitol (unlike a certain insurrection effort on 6 January 2021).
Biden’s foremost task was to demonstrate he was in charge and fully alert. Further, he would have to show he would not stumble, utter helpings of a garbled word salad or drift off into gauzy non sequiturs (unlike another politician now vying for the presidency). Let’s be honest: Joe Biden is never going to be compared favourably to Pericles, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt or Barack Obama, as an orator who moves hearts and minds. Not surprisingly, yet again, he was not the equal of those individuals in rhetorical skill.
But he was cogent, energetic, coherent, plain-speaking, and – perhaps crucially for his political chances – on point in challenging his Republican tormentors to support legislation on aid to Ukraine, on border security and on improvements in medical cost restrictions as well as middle-class financial benefits and higher taxes on the ultra-rich and big corporations, among other matters. He set out an agenda for a broad array of semi-populist proposals to improve the circumstances of middle- and working-class Americans as well as support for women’s reproductive rights.
In this speech, there was Biden’s argument that aid to Ukraine would be a defining moment for America’s role in the world in the future (including a shout-out to Sweden’s prime minister, representing Nato’s newest member in attendance), as well as plans to build a temporary harbour to deliver aid to Gaza (a modern “mulberry” for those who know the history of the Normandy invasion in World War 2). This was in tandem with an insistence of a need for a broader solution in the Near East. He was unrelenting in touting the growing success of the administration’s enacted economic policies and measures, even as he admitted there had been some difficult times in the immediate aftermath of the Covid pandemic and the economic shutdown.
In what may well represent a way of simultaneously embracing and minimising the age issue that now seems to hover perpetually over the president, he argued it is not the age of the man, the politician, or the president, but the potency and currency of his ideas.
Response
In his address, President Joe Biden strongly criticised his opponent, former president Donald Trump, without mentioning him by name. (Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images)
Summing up the president’s speech, the Washington Post said: “In a speech befitting the political moment of an election year, President Biden loaded up on criticism of former president Donald Trump — without saying his name once. He dinged the Republican presidential front-runner for his cosiness with Russia, the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and Trump’s failure in his ‘duty to care’ during the pandemic. He also enthusiastically mixed it up several times with Republicans in the chamber, and at times he seemed to encourage the call-and-response with them.”
In a flash poll by CNN of voters who had actually watched the speech – echoing positives expressed by on-air Democratic-leaning commentators – some 62% of those surveyed said Biden’s policies would move the country in the right direction. The trick for the Biden re-election campaign is to hone that initial perception, to broaden such an understanding on the part of voters, and then to drive it home in contrast to some significant, baked-in voter perceptions of his challenger for the Oval Office.
Immigration and the presumed threat to the nation posed by such movements of people is clearly the key, wedge issue Republicans hope to use in their campaign to oust the incumbent president. Despite a bill hammered out by conservative Republicans together with Democrats that would have significantly strengthened border protection and funded aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, under instruction from Donald Trump, House of Representatives Republicans refused to bring the proposed bill to a hearing, let alone a vote.
Instead, the Republican position, now, is that there is already sufficient law in place, and that all Biden has to do is snap his fingers and issue an executive order or two, and the flow of immigrants and their ability to enter the US would be stopped dead in their tracks. Never mind that the border/immigration issue has been a crisis point for several decades – including a couple Republican administrations. Whether the incumbent president can neutralise this attack line remains to be seen.
In the traditional opposition party’s response broadcast, the Republicans selected Alabama junior senator, Katie Britt, to deliver that message. Speaking from her Alabama kitchen, complete with homey touches and burnished wood finishes, Britt oozed a faux sincerity and warmth, with her voice nearly breaking and lachrymose eyes about ready to burst into tears as she spoke about the travails of women, families and little children in the blasted economic landscape apparently all around her – and the fault of Joe Biden. Her speech also blamed Biden personally for the border mess, a disastrous retreat from Kabul, Afghanistan and a kitchen-table issues economic morass and the Biden administration for failing to aggressively support the country’s friends like Ukraine and Israel – this without the slightest trace of irony, given Republican recalcitrance in passing aid/border-strengthening legislation. Britt was vociferous on the insidious danger to children and other living things from TikTok.
In future, we shall see all of these various lines of attack and defence delivered with increasing fierceness – by both parties – for the next seven months, until the electorate has been driven to distraction or exhaustion. DM