OPINION:
As President Biden prepares to deliver this year’s State of the Union, many wonder if he’ll deliver it without stepping all over whatever he and his advisers want his audience to take away from the speech. This president too often acts more like a Saturday Night Live caricature than an actual chief executive, especially when he ignores his teleprompter and takes listeners on a wandering, confusing and often troubling tour of his world and the inner workings of his mind.
The man has always been a fantasist who lives in a world that differs markedly from the one the rest of us inhabit. He insists that whatever he thinks is going on is, in fact, happening. It takes more than the fingers on one hand to count the instances in which he has told stories about his past and repeated them even after they have been proven untrue.
He has, however, been remarkably consistent in expressing the belief that he’s never really made any mistakes and knows more about just about anything than anyone except perhaps his son Hunter, who he has described as the “smartest guy I know.” This has been noted by the likes of former Bush and Obama Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, who suggested in his memoirs Mr. Biden has “been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” When asked by a reporter during the 2020 campaign if he really meant what he wrote, Mr. Gates said, “I stand by that statement.” That was before Afghanistan, Mr. Biden’s mishandling of new threats from Beijing and his bungling of the current Russian crisis, events that have convinced much of the public that the president doesn’t know as much or is as good at his job as he thinks.
None of this has swayed Mr. Biden. When he gets the opportunity, he claims that whatever problems the nation confronts are somebody else’s fault. Inflation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the immigration crisis, the current homicide epidemic … all the fault of Donald J. Trump, the Republican Congress, COVID-19, white supremacy, a Supreme Court that mindlessly believes the Constitution means what it says.
Whatever Mr. Biden says as he stands before Congress to report on the state of the union, one can bet that he’ll maintain that things are great even if people don’t realize it, that inflation is the result not of his policies, but corporate greed and now Vladimir Putin. Mr. Bidden won’t ignore the fact that energy and especially gas prices are going up but will assure us that OPEC is to blame because they wouldn’t listen to his pleas for help or because Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine and the greed of energy producers and gas station owners in this country.
He will belittle the judgment, motives, and patriotism of those who suggest his energy policies are contributing factors as energy prices skyrocket. He won’t back down on his decision to halt the production of new pipelines or to close those already operating safely. He will stand by his effort to stop energy production on private lands, increase regulations on energy producers, and the newest — closing existing nuclear power production. During his tenure, this country has gone from an energy exporter to dependent on foreign oil, and our being forced to import oil from Russia is, he will make clear, someone else’s fault.
In each case, the president and his minions have first ignored the problem. Inflation impacted only the very wealthy, and his spokesperson suggested that when store shelves went empty, people were consuming too much anyway. Any objections to the mandates imposed to deal with the pandemic were dismissed as politically motivated by people too ignorant to “follow the science.” Even as governors of both parties objected, Mr. Biden doubled down by extending the COVID-19 state of emergency. Only when blue state governors beat him over the head with polls predicting disaster at the ballot box in November did Mr. Biden’s CDC announce that the science has changed.
The White House hopes Mr. Biden’s State of the Union speech will persuade the public that whether we believe it or not, we are all better off than we were a year ago. Or that if not, it’s someone else’s fault.
That’s a fantasy that few will buy.
• David Keene is editor-at-large at The Washington Times.
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