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A speech that was even harder-edged than it sounded. Plus, what Joe Biden has learned from Elmore Leonard. (A speech annotation.)

The three people on camera through the hour-plus of Joe Biden’s third State of the Union address, in representative poses: Biden himself making a point; Kamala Harris leading Democrats in standing applause; Mike Johnson, wishing he were anyplace else. (Photo Mandel Ngan/AFP, via Getty Images.)

Through four presidencies now, I’ve done annotated versions of State of the Union addresses (SOTU). The main reason I’ve gone through this process is that, seven presidencies ago, I was involved in writing some of these presentations.

These speeches are useful objects of study because they embrace so many contradictions:

—They’re all similar in certain ways—each contains a line saying “the State of the Union is … [some variant of good]”—and they’re each unique.

—They’ve been constant over the years—a survey of foreign and domestic issues—and they’ve also notably changed. For instance: until Ronald Reagan’s time, presidents didn’t call out guests seated with or around the First Lady, to use as living policy-points or props for the speech. Now, the numerous invitees to the First Lady’s box are the subject of news stories.

—The addresses have grown longer and longer, though Biden has slightly reversed that trend.

—They’ve featured presidents at both high and low levels in the arcs of their esteem.

And they’ve been interesting to me as samples of the evolving science of presenting this performance to the public.

What follows is an annotation of Joe Biden’s third State of the Union address, three days ago.¹

But first, the big “did this speech work?” points:

1. Up to the very moment Biden took the stage, the commentariat was wondering: How will he come across? Will he trip on the way to the lectern, freeze while on camera, or reveal some other ‘doddering’ weakness? And, how can he make anyone care about what he’s done?
   
   You didn’t hear any of that once the speech was over. The line on Fox was that he had been “too partisan”—this, about an occasion at which one Fox darling was wearing a MAGA hat in the chamber, in defiance of Capitol rules, and yelling at the president. The day-after line from Fox and the GOP had changed to wondering whether the White House pharmacy had any Adderall left over, after Biden’s lively and ramped-up performance.
   
   What mattered about these judgments was that they weren’t “He’s too frail and old.” Biden’s affect had quashed that for the moment.

2. Taken just as a speech, this one worked better than most, for reasons I’ll try to detail below. Compared with the standard SOTU, it had fewer paragraphs that amounted to “we’re talking about this because we have to.” It was more consistently in the believable voice of the speaker, rather than some puffed-up formal rhetoric.
   
   And if you wanted a reminder of why speeches need to sound “authentic” rather than puffed-up, you had no more vivid illustration than the Hindenburg-scale disaster of Sen. Katie Britt’s high-school-acting “Republican response.” I have seen a lot of speeches in my time. I can’t remember another for which I was so riveted to the screen, not willing to miss a single second of a catastrophe unfolding in real time.

3. The eternal question for those preparing a SOTU is: This time, can we avoid making it just another long laundry list? Every year, creating a “thematic” SOTU is the goal. Almost every year, it doesn’t happen—simply because there are too many parts of the government, and too many other constituencies, who would feel slighted if their cause (or importance, or budget) were left out.
   This one came closer to having a single theme than most others. It was more like a “normal” speech, making its points, with less surplus baggage of points that “had” to be included.
   

4. The speech was notable in its shift of intended audience. Through his preceding three years as president, as in his preceding decades in the Senate, Joe Biden had been a “can’t we all get along?” guy. I believe that is part of why he won four years ago.
   
   Now circumstances have changed his message to:² Actually, there are people we can’t get along with. Instead I need your help to beat them. Internationally those people are led by Putin. Domestically they are led by Trump—or “my predecessor,” in the language of the speech.
   
   Biden wasn’t trying to bring Trump’s base over. Instead he was talking mainly to his own base, which he assumes to be much larger than Trump’s,to give them a reason to believe in him. He also would hope to reach anti-Trumpers in the GOP, and the “Biden-curious” in general.

That’s as much setup as we need. Now let’s go to the transcript. I’m using the “as delivered” version from the White House, which includes Biden’s numerous ad libs. I’ve marked my own notations with [brackets and bold, like this], and where useful for reference have highlighted parts of the text in itals, like this. I’ve left in “(Applause)” “Booo - ” and similar marginalia from the official text, as relevant for understanding the stage business.

Logistics note: this transcript is so long that it won’t all come across in an email. But you can click at the end to see the whole thing. Here we go:

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Remarks by President Biden in State of the Union Address

U.S. Capitol
Washington, D.C.
(March 7, 2024)

9:26 P.M. EST [The speech itself was ‘concise’ by modern standards, at just over an hour in full running time. But Biden shook so many hands and took so long working the crowd of friend-and-foe legislators on the way toward the podium that he started talking 20 minutes later than in most SOTUs.]

THE PRESIDENT:  (The President presents his prepared remarks to Speaker Johnson.)  Your bedtime reading. 

Tony!  (Applause.)  Thank you.  (Applause.)  Looking for Jill.  (Applause.)

Good evening.  (Applause.)  Good evening.  If I were smart, I’d go home now.  (Laughter and applause.) [The first of his working-the-crowd riffs. This reflected some meta-awareness of the setting and being comfortable enough with knowledge that he was under a microscope to make fun of it.]

Mr. Speaker, Madam Vice President, [Two years ago Biden placed dramatic stress on those final three words, as he was the first president ever to utter them at a SOTU. Now they are part of normal cadence—like the change in emphasis on ‘Madam Speaker’ from the first time George W. Bush said those words about Nancy Pelosi in 2007, to the last time Joe Biden did in 2022.] members of Congress, my fellow Americans. [Just as a language note: These are three words you’ll hear in virtually every presidential speech, and rarely in any other discourse. Usually it would seem puffed-up for anyone but a president to use them.]

In January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation.  And he said, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union”.  Hitler was on the march.  War was raging in Europe. [As many people have noted, from its very first words the speech headed in a non-SOTU-like direction. Usually these speeches start with something about the year just past, or the year ahead, or the importance of the ritual occasion on which the president and Congress were gathered. Elmore Leonard used to say that the secret to good writing was to “leave out the parts that people skip.” Biden means to do that here.]

President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time.  Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world. [The phrase “no ordinary time” is best known from Eleanor Roosevelt’s address at the Democratic convention in 1940, when FDR was nominated for an unprecedented third term. He had just won that third election when he made the speech Biden is referring to here. The general idea for Biden is: There are times when the country and its leaders need to get serious, and this is one of them.]

Tonight, I come to the same chamber to address the nation.  Now it’s we who face an unprecedented moment in the history of the Union. 

And, yes, my purpose tonight is to wake up the Congress and alert the American people that this is no ordinary moment either.  Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault at home as they are today. [By acclamation, two of the three greatest US presidents are Lincoln and FDR; George Washington would be the third. Presidents always look for ways to liken the nation’s challenges to those faced by these most-revered previous leaders. The high-road reason is to focus attention on emergencies of the moment, and to inspire today’s Americans by past examples of shared purpose, etc. By implication they want to suggest that they, as leaders, are following these giants’ footsteps.³]

What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are under attack at — both at home and overseas at the very same time. [Looking at the transcript, the theme of the next few paragraphs is clearer and more striking than I thought when hearing the speech. That theme is: Putin and Trump are a team. We’re fighting the same battle on two fronts.
Biden’s literal in-your-face challenge to the Supreme Court, with six members sitting before him, was more dramatic in real time. But this is a more powerful and important argument.]

Overseas, Putin of Russia is on the march, invading Ukraine and sowing chaos throughout Europe and beyond.

If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you: He will not.  (Applause.) [This was the first of many moments where you could see House Speaker Mike Johnson on a skewer. He was nodding along in apparent agreement with Biden in this passage. When Kamala Harris stood straight up to applaud, as she did countless times, you could see him beginning to move—and then stop himself, as he observed the crowd—that is, the MAGA-dominated House GOP. During his hour-plus on the unblinking eye of TV, Johnson carefully modulated his tools of body-language reaction: standing vs sitting (rarely standing); clapping or not (again rarely); smiling vs frowning, deadpan, or eye-rolling; and nodding his head in approval or shaking it in disagreement. He did not appear to be glad to be there.]

But Ukraine — Ukraine can stop Putin.  (Applause.)  Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons that it needs to defend itself.  (Applause.) [Johnson nodding “Yes” on this. Then actually clapping, but with hands held low, out of view from the House floor.]

That is all — that is all Ukraine is asking.  They’re not asking for American soldiers.  In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine, and I’m determined to keep it that way.  (Applause.) 

But now assistance to Ukraine is being blocked by those who want to walk away from our world leadership.

It wasn’t long ago when a Republican president named Ronald Reagan thundered, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  (Applause.) [Johnson nods, claps.]

Now — now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, “Do whatever the hell you want.”  [Again this was striking at the time, and more so on re-reading and re-watching the video. An incumbent president is flat-out saying that ‘my predecessor’ is encouraging the enemy.]

AUDIENCE:  Booo —