NOTEBOOK: Eleven takeaways from the State of the Union

Saving democracy so we can do stuff, a stealth care agenda, making use of one’s age, and more

I watched President Biden’s State of the Union address with great anticipation, and I’m sure many of you did, too. I don’t have a grand essay or anything, but I thought I’d open my notebook, so to speak, and share some of my early reactions this morning.

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1. He framed the uniqueness of the moment in a way that makes clear his own personal sense of purpose and mission. By starting with the idea that democracy hasn’t been this imperiled at home since Lincoln and this imperiled abroad since F.D.R., except that now both things are happening at the same time, he made the stakes plain. And presidents, like all of us, settle into a sense of purpose if they are lucky. And he has found his. This is his cause, whether it polls well or not. He wants to be the guy who stood up to capital-P Putinism abroad and lower-case-P putinism at home in America.

2. He focused relentlessly on costs and quality of life. This is perhaps a hint of a bigger shift in the making for Democrats. You’re seeing a party that is realizing that people sometimes find big, sweeping policy ambition abstract-sounding and expensive-sounding, especially when they are stressed, even when those policies would drastically improve their lives. It’s just political reality. Smart Democrats are learning to move away from promoting policies in terms of giant new programs and instead to promote them as improvements to basic quality of life, reductions in cost, medicine for your stress. This is human-scale policy making, built on an anthropological understanding of the pain points in people’s lives, and framed through relieving those pain points rather than selling big programs.

3. He made use of his age to be a kind of grandfather of the nation.