The stakes in Biden's first SOTU address
Health care will make an appearance, but the worldwide fight against authoritarianism comes first
President Biden’s approval ratings hovered around 37% in polls taken before Russia invaded Ukraine. Inflation, the prolonged COVID-19 pandemic, plus rising concern about the president’s mental acuity — Biden turns 80 next November — topped the list of voters’ concerns.
But the world’s boldest act of military aggression since the U.S. wrongfully invaded Iraq in 2003 will certainly improve the president’s standing in the weeks and months ahead. Biden’s sure-handed performance during the crisis may silence the right wing media’s trumped up finger-pointing about his mental fitness.
Many of those outlets are furiously backpedaling from their shameless support of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s decade-long campaign of disinformation, hacking and internet memes to undermine democracy here and abroad — a campaign now pursued with tanks, missiles and bullets.
The latest polls indicate the American people overwhelmingly support President Biden’s marshaling of allied support for painful economic sanctions against Putin and his oligarch lackeys. Polls also indicate support for sending additional arms to the besieged Zelenskiy government in Kyiv, even as they express an overwhelming caution regarding military involvement in the conflict.
The issue of U.S. intervention will likely arise in the president’s first state of the union address tonight. I suspect Biden will say that U.S. intervention cannot be on the table because Ukraine isn’t a member of NATO. At the same time, he needs to send a convincing message to NATO countries, especially those previously within the former Soviet Union’s sphere of influence, that the U.S. will protect their borders if worse comes to worst and Putin actually conquers Ukraine.
Pandemic’s end in sight
Data indicate success for the president on the pandemic front as well. The Omicron wave appears to be in full retreat. Mask mandates are being lifted. By spring, daily life and economic activity in most regions of the country should be returning to close to normal.
President Biden can rightfully take some credit for the reduction of deaths and hospitalizations during the latest outbreak. They were overwhelmingly concentrated among the unvaccinated, a population the president and his public health authorities did everything in their power to educate and protect. He would be wise to include a call for continued vigilance and renew his plea that everyone get vaccinated.
The inflation now shrinking consumers’ pocketbooks is the most significant issue dragging down the president’s ratings. But here, too, there is reason to think that the bad news may abate over the next few months.
The supply chain disruptions caused by COVID are slowly untangling, eased in part by the administration’s efforts to reduce the backlog of ships at Los Angeles port, the main entry point for Asian goods entering the U.S. The lifting of pandemic restrictions should increase consumer purchases of services like live performances, movies, restaurants, and travel to pre-pandemic levels. And a reduction in the massive shift into online purchases of home-delivered manufactured products that drove up those prices can be expected as well.
Oligarchs with their hands on the pump
The run-up in oil prices, however, has an outsized impact on voter attitudes not only because of their visibility at the gas pump, but because of our ubiquitous dependency on the product. Russia is the world’s third largest oil producer and the major supplier of natural gas to western Europe. A prolonged conflict in Ukraine will disrupt that supply, providing other oligopolistic producers (whether state-owned like Saudi Arabia or western monopolies like Exxon Mobil) the perfect opportunity to continue gouging the market.
The president would be wise to remind the public that there is no shortage of oil or gas. The world is awash in both.
Oil prices predictably plunge during recessions and fairly quickly return to pre-recession levels, as the above chart reveals. If you compare the price before and after the last two recessions, the plunge in the price of a barrel of oil in inflation-adjusted dollars during the steep-but-brief COVID recession was just as severe during the Great Recession of 2008-09. It still hasn’t returned to the $120-per-barrel level seen as recently as 2014 and is barely above the peak of the Trump years.
The war in Ukraine gives Biden an opportunity to remind Americans that the era of our dependence on fossil fuels must be brought to an end. We need to invest in solar, wind, wave and geothermal sources of energy; advanced battery storage technologies; electric vehicles; and industrial, commercial and residential building efficiency.
President Biden should remind the oil and gas industry, which, we should never forget, provides massive financial support for anti-democratic forces in our own country, that Russian imperialism is not a screen for their profiteering from short-term market disruptions. The value of their stranded assets is bound to decline over the next decade as businesses and consumers shift to ecologically sustainable, earth-friendly energy resources. Their job as corporate entities is to adapt by becoming energy producers — not oil and gas producers.
How about health care?
Presidents usually spend the bulk of their SOTUAs offering an impassioned plea for their domestic priorities. Administration officials on Monday gave reporters an early preview of its plans for the health care arena — a major initiative to improve nursing home safety. COVID took the lives of more than 200,000 nursing home residents in the past two years, about 20% of all deaths from the disease.
The president will unveil new regulations requiring that every nursing home has a sufficient number of appropriately trained staff. It will propose new penalties for homes that fail to provide safe care, including disbarment from government-funded programs. The initiative also promises to give families more information about the quality of care inside nursing homes, facilitating better decisions when selecting a home.
Biden will also call on Congress to pass the health care-related provisions in his stalled Build Back Better bill. Failure to maintain the higher subsidies for Affordable Care plans that were passed in the early days of the COVID pandemic could result in millions of low-and-moderate income Americans losing their health insurance. Plus, reining in sky-high out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs remains a major talking point on the campaign trail for Congressional Democrats, who will be fighting this fall to maintain their slim majorities in the House and Senate.
But it’s unlikely that any domestic policy issues beyond inflation will make an appearance in the post-speech commentary. Putin’s decision last week to send his tanks into Ukraine woke a slumbering world to the fact that nothing less than political democracy and personal freedom are under attack from the worldwide kleptocrat-authoritarian alliance he leads.
That alliance is alive and well in the U.S., too. If we fail to stop them now, the price we pay for drugs will be the least of our worries.