The Memo: Ukraine crisis muddles Biden’s SOTU opportunity

One of President Biden’s best chances to reset his political fortunes is destined to be overshadowed by the crisis in eastern Europe.

Biden will deliver his first State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

But the atmosphere surrounding that speech is markedly different now than it might have been even a couple of weeks ago — to the detriment of the president and his party.

The big speech could have given Biden a chance to highlight the things that have gone right for his administration. Job creation is the most obvious example as well as infrastructure investments and the return of some semblance of normal life as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes.

The president is sure to hit those points. But his speech will be delivered in the middle of a huge confrontation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

And that confrontation itself has the capacity to exacerbate some of the most acute challenges Biden faces at home, notably inflation and high gas prices.

Putin shook the world this week by sending troops into Ukraine despite fervent diplomatic efforts by Biden and other Western leaders to dissuade him from doing so. On Friday morning, there were already reports that Russian forces were on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

Later on Friday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that the administration would sanction Putin personally in addition to the raft of sanctions that Biden had already announced on Russian financial institutions and others.

The crisis will not be resolved anytime soon, complicating Tuesday’s speech for the president. It’s the kind of complication he can ill afford. 

His party faces a huge challenge in November’s midterm elections as it seeks to defend wafer-thin congressional majorities. The historical trends and the dynamics of the current moment are against the Democrats.

The president’s party almost always loses seats in his first midterm elections. The sole exception in the 21st century to date was the GOP in the first midterms after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. 

Biden doesn’t look like he will be much help to his party colleagues, electorally speaking. His average approval rating at polling and data site FiveThirtyEight shows roughly 53 percent of the public disapproving of his job performance and about 41 percent approving.

The State of the Union address would, under more normal circumstances, be a key opportunity to shake up those dynamics. The landmark speech gives any president a rare chance to speak in an unmediated way to the American public. 

When Biden delivered an address to a joint session of Congress in April last year — not an official State of the Union but a close equivalent — it drew a TV audience of around 27 million people. That’s almost 10 times larger than the highest-rated shows on cable news.

The president might pull just as big an audience, or a bigger one, on Tuesday, but the capacity of the address to drive the political agenda onto more favorable ground will be diminished.

Biden and the White House have already got a taste of how the crisis in Ukraine can suck the oxygen out of the room for other events.

On Friday, the president announced his nominee for the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

The 51-year-old Jackson, currently a federal appellate judge on the District of Columbia Circuit, would be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court if she is confirmed. She would also be the first former public defender in that role.

But even in his remarks introducing her, Biden alluded to events on the other side of the world.

“Today, as we watch freedom and liberty under attack abroad, I’m here to fulfill my responsibilities under the Constitution to preserve freedom and liberty here in the United States of America,” he said. 

Biden’s pick was big news, of course — but not as big as it otherwise would have been, absent the crisis in Eastern Europe. On the websites of many news organizations, stories about Jackson’s nomination appeared below roundups of the latest developments in Ukraine.

The Supreme Court pick will resonate with activist groups and the most politically engaged voters — especially progressives, for whom Jackson was the favorite among the women reported to be on Biden’s shortlist. 

But the current environment makes it hard to tell whether the Supreme Court story can really resonate beyond those core supporters to the people Biden most needs to reach — Americans who might have voted for him in order to defeat former President Trump in 2020 but who are not feeling especially enthused or energized by his record to date.

It’s not all doom and gloom for Biden, of course. 

He has been able to galvanize a strong Western alliance against Putin. Some experts believe that, even setting the morality of Putin’s actions aside, the Russian leader has made a major strategic error by launching his assault on Ukraine. Biden promised this week to make Putin a “pariah” on the international stage.

On Tuesday, Biden can cut a statesmanlike figure as he delivers his speech at the Capitol. A foreign crisis, even one where American troops are not directly in harm’s way, can make appeals to national unity more compelling — and make partisan criticisms of a president more perilous.

Still, the best-case scenario for Biden is one in which he demonstrates he can be trusted to deal with an ongoing foreign crisis.

That’s all well and good. 

But it may not be enough to win over many Americans who are dealing with problems on the home front — and are no longer sure that Biden can solve them.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.