Biden’s State of the Union address is the most important speech in his political career

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It is not a generally accepted practice for a presidential candidate to hold a campaign rally in a forum where half the audience holds the speaker in contempt, is looking for opportunities to offer impudent, disrespectful catcalls, and is dedicated to undermining his policies and sending him into mortifying defeat and permanent retirement. And yet that is exactly what President Joe Biden did Thursday night.

The occasion was his State of the Union Address, a much-honoured Constitutional requirement that nonetheless customarily results in a lengthy, stultifying speech long on policy proposals and short on actual prospects of congressional approval, a discourse swiftly forgotten if heeded at all. In the entire sweep of American history, only a handful are remembered and few — besides Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech, Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a “war on poverty,” and George W. Bush’s description of an “axis of evil”— are quoted in future decades by even the most attentive historians and the most desperate presidential speechwriters.

But gamely did Mr. Biden dive in, knowing that commentators would inevitably combine his remarks and Donald Trump’s Super Tuesday triumphs and describe this occasion — pomp and unusual circumstance — as the opening rally of the 2024 general-election campaign.

He clearly saw it that way as well. And he clearly understood that this was the most important speech he had delivered in his 44 years on Capitol Hill, and perhaps in his half-century in American politics. He faced not only Republican critics but also an American public scrutinizing the physical and mental capacity of its 81-year-old President. “I know it may not look like it,” he said, “but I’ve been around a little.”

Mr. Biden used this dreary, set-piece ritual to serve up a campaign-hustings stemwinder in the manner of early American political figures, separated from that tradition only because there was no liquor on offer, the way it was at 19th century political rallies. He nonetheless offered a glimpse of how he plans to campaign against Mr. Trump, who is only days from clinching the Republican presidential nomination and setting up the campaign rematch that Americans, in almost the only thing that prompts widespread agreement among them, positively dread.

There were, to be sure, campaign barbs, their motivation and targets barely concealed. He spoke of Mr. Trump only as “a former president” and said that the remarks of “my predecessor” inviting President Vladimir Putin’s Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” against NATO scofflaws were “outrageous, dangerous and... unacceptable.” He referred to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot as “a dagger at the throat of America” and lectured his Republican rivals, “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

There was, as always, a laundry list of policy proposals, marked the moment they escaped the President’s lips as “DOA” — dead on arrival. One of them: a massive overhaul of the country’s tax code, including raising the corporate minimum tax. Another: a ban on assault weapons and vast universal background checks for gun purchasers.

There was the customary appeal to American values of unity and human dignity — talk about a futile hope in this divided country in these divisive times! — and paeans to the better angels of the American spirit, not that these angels (the phrase comes from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, 163 years ago this month) have been spotted very often on Capitol Hill or, for that matter, on the head of a pin anywhere within America’s borders.

Clearly the President’s hope was that in performing a chore of state in a stately manner, he would draw a contrast with Mr. Trump, who ungraciously greeted the suspension of the Republican nomination campaign of former governor Nikki Haley with a Wednesday morning upper-case reminder that she “got TROUNCED last night in record-setting fashion.”

The autumn election promises a repeat of the 2020 contest, with Mr. Trump trying to become the first former president since Grover Cleveland to return to the presidency after being defeated, in the 1888 case by Benjamin Harrison. When Mr. Harrison issued his 1891 State of the Union address — at the time these messages were submitted in writing, not in-person — he was able to submit his report, with his comments about the troubles the United States was having with Canada over the seal hunt, without real-time interruptions by his rival.

Mr. Biden had no such advantage. Mr. Trump spent the evening critiquing the Biden remarks in a “play-by-play” commentary. It was as if the President’s rival was sitting on his right shoulder, nattering as the address was being delivered, at one point saying on his truth Social platform, “THE DRUGS ARE WEARING OFF!” and taunting, “He is so angry and crazy!”

In an unusual break from the comity of Washington custom, he upbraided the Supreme Court for overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, part of a lengthy discussion about reproductive rights, a major theme of the campaign the Democrats are planning for the fall.

In a speech that otherwise will be little noted nor long remembered — as Lincoln would have said while employing language he used in his 1863 Gettysburg Address — Mr. Biden channeled Franklin Delano Roosevelt in describing this era as “no ordinary time.”

It was an evening with politics in 360 degrees: Protesters along the President’s motorcade route calling for a Gaza ceasefire — a notion he would embrace an hour later along with supplying humanitarian aid to Gaza. Democratic women attired in white to bring attention to abortion rights. A prominent Biden critic, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, standing by the President in a bright-red Make America Great Again baseball cap in defiant contravention of the House dress code. A glimpse of a renegade Republican (Senator Mitt Romney) sitting with a renegade Democrat (Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia). Democrats chanting “Four more years!”

That, of course, was the hope and goal for Mr. Biden’s 16-block journey down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol, the unofficial but unmistakable opening of the American journey toward the November election.