In his State of the Union address, Joe Biden poses as a benefactor of the forgotten of the United States
The vigor of America, the ardor of its octogenarian president. Giving off confidence and optimism, as well as an energy that he often lacks orally, Joe Biden delivered, Tuesday, February 7, to one of the flagship exercises of American politics: the speech on the state. of the Union before Congress. The president gave a long speech on America’s ongoing industrial recovery, sometimes with protectionist accents, often empathetic, but also defiantly borrowing from the Republicans.
Joe Biden was taking a vitality test. Rather, he succeeded by revisiting his classic formulas and intimate references, polished over four decades of public life. With a leitmotif, repeated a dozen times: “Let’s finish the job. » A way to build a bridge between these two intense years at the White House and the future, which could go through a new presidential candidacy.
No thunderous announcement, nor reflection on the state of the world, but a long, sometimes tedious enumeration of measures already taken or hoped for, on the internal level. The priority for Joe Biden was to focus on the daily lives of his fellow citizens. He posed as a defender of vulnerable Americans – the elderly, the sick, unqualified workers – and he castigated those who crush them, in classic allusions but so little followed by effects in Congress. Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tech: Energy, pharmaceutical and web giants have been blamed for their abuse of dominant position, their excessive profits which evade taxes or their lack of respect for privacy . Joe Biden has sometimes gone into detail by referring to illegitimate charges such as the fees imposed by airlines for a family to be seated together or those which are paid in the event of a change of Internet operator.
Call to Deep America
But most of his remarks concerned the economic rearmament of the country. Many lights are green. Inflation remains high but seems to be coming under control (6.5% over one year, end of December). Above all, the White House claims twelve million jobs created in two years, a spectacular figure. The unemployment rate fell to 3.4%, the lowest since 1969. It is difficult to measure the share of natural rebound after the peak of the pandemic and the direct effect of federal policies. The investment plans adopted in Congress – in particular that on infrastructure – have barely begun to be rolled out on the ground, but Joe Biden is trying to educate them by increasing his travels.
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