As I watched Joe Biden deliver his State of the Union Address last Thursday, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” sketches on Saturday Night Live in the 1980s.
The Grumpy Old Man would be introduced as a commentator on SNL’s Weekend Edition segment. He would be dressed in a Cardigan sweater, a shirt buttoned at the neck, and a mop of unkempt white hair.
“I’m not happy; I don’t like this chair, I don’t like this desk, and I don’t like being here,” he would begin. “I’m a grumpy old man and I don’t like anything the way it is now compared to how it used to be.
“In my day, we didn’t have safety standards for toys. We got rusty nails and big bags of broken glass, and we liked it! In my day we didn’t have facial wipes. When you turned 17, you were given the family handkerchief. It had been used for generations, and it had never been washed. And we liked it!
“In my day, we didn’t need moving pictures. There was just one show in town, and it was called STARE AT THE SUN! You’d sit in the middle of an open field and stare up at the sun until your eyeballs burst into flames! Soon, your head was on fire, and people were roasting chickens over it! And we liked it!”
You get the picture.
So, as I watched Joe Biden rant on and on, yelling, shouting, and grimacing, all I could see was Dana Carvey dressed as the Grumpy Old Man.
Watching Joe Biden deliver a speech is like watching an old man yell at kids to “Get off my lawn!”
After spending the first few minutes angrily attacking Donald Trump, calling him “my predecessor,” I began to wonder if the White House had managed to over-medicate Biden with some secret concoction of joy juice or an infusion of amphetamines.
I figured he would mellow out a little, but instead, Biden seemed to grow angrier and louder as the evening progressed.
“Wow, this is like a shouting match; every line is being shouted,” former President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social during Biden’s speech. Trump had promised to fact-check Biden’s remarks.
The evening got off to a rather inauspicious start. First, Biden arrived almost a half-hour late—a no no for presidents before a State of the Union speech. Maybe the White House handlers were giving him a last burst of joy juice before guiding him to the limo that would take him to the Capitol Building.
Then, when Biden arrived, he spent another 10 minutes or so making his way to the podium through knots of grabby and pushy politicians who wanted to take selfies with Joe. When he finally got to the podium, he committed a major faux pas by forgetting (or perhaps it was by design) to allow the Speaker of the House to introduce him, as is customary. Presidents who give the SOTU come as visitors to the House of Representatives and to Congress, and, as such, it is a long-standing tradition that he does not speak until the speaker formally introduces him.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi introduced Donald Trump, though I am sure she wasn’t thrilled to do so.
However, Biden never gave Speaker Mike Johnson that opportunity. Instead, he handed Johnson and Vice-president Kamala Harris copies of his speech, turned, and began talking.
Did Biden forget? Did the White House staff tell him, “Now, Joe, let Speaker Johnson introduce you.”
Perhaps it was an intentional slight directed at the Republican speaker.
Or maybe grumpy old Joe just plain forgot.
We will never know.
The fact is, the nation watched a jacked-up Joe Biden over-compensating for his typically somnolent demeanor by raising his voice, scrunching up his face into a countenance reflecting fire and fury, and leering with gritted teeth.
It was quite a performance.
Too bad it failed on several levels.
First, it was less of a State of the Union address than it was a one-hour and eight-minute campaign stem-winder. I thought the speech would never end.
I was slightly shocked when he glared at the Justices of the Supreme Court and chastised them for over-turning Roe vs. Wade and their anti-abortion stance, saying something to the effect that America’s angry women will make their strong voices heard in the 2024 election. The pro-abortion crowd loved it. The justices were predictably impassive and unyielding.
I kept waiting for Biden to talk about his plan to imprison Donald Trump so he can’t run for president. He didn’t. I guess he didn’t want to draw any comparisons between himself and the world’s most prominent despots and dictators.
Then, in a whopper, Biden told the nation that the economy was up and crime was down.
The groan from the right side of the aisle was discernable. As Biden droned on, he sometimes stretched the facts or left out important context in his harangue.
Here, for example, are a few falsehoods found by various fact checkers:
- Biden boasted that under his leadership, “wages keep going up.” However, over the entirety of Biden’s presidency, wages have been down when adjusted for inflation.
- Biden claimed that the more recent U.S. inflation rate of about 3% is the “lowest in the world!” However, several nations reported lower rates than the U.S. in December.
- He again claimed to have “cut the federal deficit by over one trillion dollars” — although declining deficits have mostly been the result of expiring emergency pandemic spending.
- He suggested that “many” of the new jobs in U.S. semiconductor factories will be “paying $100,000 a year and don’t require a college degree.” However, an industry trade group previously reported that only workers with bachelor’s or graduate degrees make that much.
- Biden said, “My policies have attracted $650 billion in private sector investment in clean energy [and] advanced manufacturing.” These are announcements about intentions to invest, not actual investments.
- The president said billionaires pay an average federal tax rate of only 8.2%, but that’s a White House calculation that includes earnings on unsold stock as income.
- Biden said the Affordable Care Act has allowed over 100 million people to no longer be denied health insurance due to preexisting conditions. However, pre-ACA employer plans covered many of those people, and they couldn’t deny policies.
Democrats no doubt left the House chamber grateful that Biden’s stumbles, mumbles, and bumbles were relatively less frequent than they normally are.
Republicans probably left the chamber amazed that Biden was as coherent as he was and that he didn’t nod off during his oration.
As for me, I like what Plato once said:
“A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool speaks because he has to say something.”
I will let you decide which of those phrases best fits the grumpy old man who delivered the State of the Union address Thursday night.
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(Ronald E. Yates is a U.S. Army veteran, an author, a former Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent, and Professor and dean Emeritus of Journalism at the University of Illinois.)
His website: http://www.ronaldyatesbooks.com/
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