Biden’s State of the Union Was Too Much Business as Usual

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- President Joe Biden's most crucial task in his State of the Union address was to start bringing a deeply divided country back together. This would have been true even if Russia's appalling assault on Ukraine hadn't happened — but Vladimir Putin's reckless gamble makes repairing U.S. politics more vital than before. A divided America is a weaker America, less able to secure its own interests and impaired as the leader of the free world, which the free world still needs it to be.

The president rightly put Ukraine at the top of his speech. He was warmly applauded by Republicans as well as Democrats for his expressions of solidarity with the victims of Putin's war. Opponents as well as supporters give him credit for guiding an energized alliance toward a much more robust response to Russia's aggression than Putin, for one, ever expected.

Ukraine's plight is still worsening, the limits of what the U.S. and its allies can do are starting to bind, and the threat of escalation is real. Yet the president pivoted quickly from the crisis in Europe to a business-as-usual recitation of familiar domestic priorities. This was a mistake not because voters care more about foreign policy than about jobs, prices and their own economic prospects. Short of outright war, they don't. It was a mistake because sufficient unity and consensus are as necessary in the domestic realm as in foreign affairs. Biden should have used the Ukraine emergency to recognize this and move his presidency in a more productive direction.

During Biden's first year, the political divisions he promised to bridge widened further. To be sure, these splits aren't his fault — former President Donald Trump and his Republican enablers are far more to blame — but he's made no great effort to repair them. Instead of reaching out to political moderates, he let himself be co-opted by the left of his party.

With one notable exception, his speech made no effort to correct this. He did scorn “Defund the police” as an absurd slogan, and said what the great majority of Americans believe — that “Fund the police” was a better idea. But the rest of his domestic agenda was essentially unrevised, even though Biden has tried and failed to advance it through a closely divided Congress.

He renewed his calls for a huge new spending plan that lacks the revenues to pay for it. He called for a strict “Buy American” approach to public investment, which sees getting taxpayers value for money as secondary. He championed labor unions and called for passage of the PRO Act. When he turned to the country's inflation problem, he said “Don't cut wages, cut costs” — a puzzling instruction, since most employers are currently raising wages, not lowering them. As before, he channeled the left's reflexive suspicion of profits and business success.

To be sure, the president's criticism of the prices Americans pay for drugs was valid, and his remedy (let Medicare negotiate with manufacturers) is correct. His proposals for action on climate change are urgently necessary, though for the moment they're tied to the omnibus measure going nowhere. Taken as a whole, his restated domestic-policy ambitions offer no scope for progress based on bipartisan cooperation.

If Democrats were surging in the polls and looking confidently toward the midterm elections, this reluctance to compromise would be understandable. But Biden's popularity is shaky and his party is heading for heavy defeat. A course correction is essential. By creating a moment of clarity and common purpose, the Ukraine emergency offered the president a chance to reset. Unfortunately, he chose not to deviate.

The Editors are members of the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board.