He has only just begun the campaign, but no rally on his path in search of re-election as president will have greater consequences than the one that Joe Biden plans to give this Thursday in Washington in front of a few hundred people. It will be in the Capitol, when he fulfills his annual constitutional obligation to report to Congress on the state of the Union. Although it is not really a rally, but a speech. In it, Biden plays his game in front of millions of viewers in the United States and also around the world.
It will be a long intervention, long enough to give him time to sell the achievements of his three years in office and to those who doubt the suitability of candidate Biden – an 81-year-old man, who will be 86 when he stops being president if is re-elected―, to check if what special prosecutor Robert Hur said is true. Hur was tasked with investigating Biden’s handling of some confidential papers he retained from his years as Barack Obama’s vice president, but he also decided to put on the geriatrician’s gown to add an unsolicited diagnosis about the patient’s “poor memory,” which, He said, he forgot dates, some as significant as those of the death of his son Beau, who died in 2015 from a brain tumor.
So the first question that will float in the air in the Congressional chamber in an event chaired by the vice president, Kamala Harris, and by the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson ―a solemn occasion to which members of both Houses and guests of the president, famous and anonymous, are summoned― is how Biden was. And above all, if he is seen as too old to direct the destiny of the leading world power at a time of great geopolitical instability. The challenge is great, above all, for a man who was never particularly comfortable in the arts of oratory and who in these three years has tended to avoid contact with the press.
According to the White House, Biden has been putting the finishing touches to the text over the weekend at his Camp David residence, supported by teleprompterssurrounded by six assistants and a historian from the school of optimists, Jon Meacham, always with the stimulus of a tea designed to, ahem, soothe the throat.
It is such an important speech, and even more so in this election year, that his assistants began working on it in December. Its contents are kept secret. So it is not clear whether during that long speech he will quote his opponent, Donald Trump, although it can be taken for granted that he will talk about Ukraine, Israel’s war in Gaza, China, abortion and immigration.