Most serious observers of the President's State of the Union speech agreed that Joe Biden has his mojo back. Beyond the impressive success in progressive legislation last year, fully described during the speech, Biden projected the image of a "Happy Warrior", a title first bestowed on Al Smith during his 1928 presidential campaign. His claim that "We all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now" left Republicans scrambling to pretend that this is not their position, despite years-long evidence of GOP attempts to undo both programs. The Loony Tunes MAGA wing of Republican House members continued to behave like a pre-kindergarten recess mob, heckling and interrupting. (An Arabic saying applies here: "The dogs bark, but the caravan passes on." In this instance, the comparison is unfair to Man's Best Friend.)
As he ran through the list of this administration's significant legislative achievements during 2022, the President sounded very much like a man positioning his heavy artillery for a re-election campaign next year. Skeptics on all sides and pessimists within our party, citing low approval ratings in opinion polls, would do well to remember the 1948 election. Harry Truman, an incumbent with similarly low opinion ratings, campaigned vigorously against the record of the Republican "Do-nothing 80th Congress" and soundly defeated Tom Dewey.
Democrats then held one substantial advantage which we lack today: a heavily unionized labor force, almost unanimously supportive of our party. We also had an advantage with Democrat-initiated legislation such as the GI bills assisting returning World War II veterans with housing and education costs, an important element of postwar economic recovery and the launch of the 1946-64 Baby Boom.
Forty years of unbridled speculation on Wall Street, tax cuts for the wealthy and baseless "trickle down" economic theory, unleashed by Reagan, carried forward by both Presidents Bush and -- to be honest -- not contested vigorously enough by either the Clinton or Obama administrations, have left millions of Americans distrustful of government. The gap between haves and have-nots in the US economy has not diminished, and the national record in education and all-embracing health care approaches Third World standards. Many blue collar Americans without college degrees, in all racial and ethnic categories, no longer support our party. The GOP, notably during the Trump era, has mastered the shameless art of picking working people's pockets and transferring the proceeds to the ultra-wealthy, undetected by their victims, all the while stirring populist anger at perceived "elites."
Whatever the President decides, in consultation with Dr. Jill Biden and other close family members, on running again in 2024, he set out in his address a formidable list of new laws and appropriations aimed at restoring US competitiveness globally. "Jobs are coming back, pride is coming back, because of choices we made in the last two years. This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America and make a real difference in your lives." To back up this point, the January non-farm payroll report, released days after the State of the Union speech, showed an increase of 517,000 jobs since year-end.
The president went on the road later in the week to hail infrastructure projects in Wisconsin, Maryland, New York and New Jersey that will provide tens of thousands of jobs: "every freaking one, union labor," as he was quoted verbatim in the New York Times.
As Democrats, we need to put our best efforts to work in getting every fellow citizen to register and vote for our party next year at every level: municipal, county, state and federal. The biggest threat to American democracy is the return of foreign interests, insurrectionists and would-be-totalitarians, represented by Ron DeSantis and his ilk.
By Dan Solon, member, DA Barcelona
Disclosure: These views were written by a live Democrat, not ChatGPT.
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