The State of the Union speech can only be as powerful as the president delivering it

(Or, really, the office of the presidency)

On Tuesday night, President Biden will deliver the State of the Union address. Like so many things, this puts in squarely in the path of many bad takes about presidential speeches. I’ve generally defended the speech as a civic exercise. It’s a nice symbolic display of interaction, if not always cooperation, between the executive and legislative branches. It lets the president present his agenda to Congress and the people in a transparent way. Speeches aren’t magic public opinion elixirs and symbols aren’t a substitute for substance. But democracy still is poorer without them.

We go into the 2023 address in a weird political moment. The Democrats didn’t do so badly in the midterms, inflation is coming down, and the last legislative session was productive. The president is unpopular, tied to everything from a difficult economy to an ongoing pandemic to apparently lax handling of classified documents. It can be tempting to think about what deficits in his presidency the speech might fix. But it doesn’t really make sense to start thinking about the State of the Union by asking what the president needs to do.

The State of the Union is a weird speech, constitutionally mandated, but like so much of Article II, only vaguely outlined. Over time, it’s shifted back and forth from a written message to an oral address, and sometimes both. Technology has brought it to radio, television, and now, of course, the golden age of real-time commentary from anyone with an internet connection and a terrible opinion. Across these formats, the State of the Union is really good at enhancing a few key presidential capabilities. It can nationalize an issue, defining the party agenda and position and placing it into the national political dialogue. It can also bring a sense of urgency to an issue or idea, connecting it to broader goals and purpose, and maybe drawing some press attention.

At a time when the parties were less nationalized – with more ideological and policy variation across geographic regions, more influenced by local actors, the ability to claim to speak for the nation was a real advantage that presidents enjoyed over other politicians. This kind of influence doesn’t necessarily track with the TV and radio era, either. There are some important examples of presidents using their annual written message to Congress on the state of the union this way – in 1887 Grover Cleveland used the message to essentially bind warring Democratic Party factions to his position on tariff reform and define the party’s stance on the issue. Reaching even further back, James Buchanan’s parting 1860 address informed a last-ditch effort by Republicans to offer a compromise bill on slavery to hold off the civil war. Words can matter to clarify issues, positions, and arguments, and other political actors can pick up on this.

But parties now are plenty nationalized, and the differences between their stances tends to be well-known. Biden isn’t going to clarify the Democratic Party’s stance on an issue on Tuesday night, or tell most attentive citizens anything they don’t already know about the disagreements between the two parties.  Furthermore, Biden’s political strategy thus far has been to maneuver across different party factions, and to build the broad, cross-party coalition that won him the presidency. He probably could use the address to nationalize an issue, but it’s not clear that this would play to his strategic advantages.

The State of the Union speech is also a time to identify priorities and ask Congress to address them in the coming year. Highlighting in this venue can remind the audience of its importance or explain that importance in new ways. George W. Bush’s description of the “axis of evil” in his 2002 speech laid out the foundations of the preemptive war doctrine that would come to define his foreign policy presidency. At a time when 9/11 attacks were fresh in the public mind and the framing of “evil” was powerful, Bush connected these ideas to his policy objectives, creating a sense of urgency around the Iraq War even as skeptics pressed for more time, more debate, and more international cooperation.

It's not clear that Biden could bring urgency to an issue at this moment, or in a public speech, which isn’t his best format. But the more important question is whether he could gain anything from doing so. The last few years have presented what feels like no fewer than five urgent political crises every minute or so, and some segment of the public remains dissatisfied with the administration’s approach to the war in Ukraine, inflation, gun violence, COVID-19, the Chinese surveillance balloon, just to name a few. Urgency is useful when you’re trying to heighten a sense of crisis to justify policy. It’s less valuable when you’re trying to address a bunch of external crises and calm a justifiably agitated nation.

There are areas of potential as well. On the subject of nationalization, Biden’s party remains divided on questions about how to address police violence. Biden used last year’s address to advocate for funding the police, placing him squarely in the more moderate wing of the party. Others in the broader Democratic coalition have called for more serious reforms to policing. If Biden can come up with a set of policies and ideas that can appeal to the various factions, this speech would be the time to do it. And it seems likely that he’ll advocate for the stalled George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Even if his words can’t cut through the partisan impasse on qualified immunity, they might be able to reinforce his party’s position on it.

Biden has also tried over the course of the past year to heighten the sense of public urgency about the threat to democracy posed by election denial and by the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. This seemed to be a winning message for Democrats in the 2022 elections, along with a sense of urgency around abortion rights in light of the Dobbs decision.

Taking this approach would give the address a harder partisan edge than it’s had in the past, not just clarifying party positions but drawing real contrasts and even linking the other party to existential threats to the nation. In the modern era, the address has tended to take a more positive tone. But the overlap between the political environment in 2023 and the potential of the State of the Union lies in a much darker place.

Another staple of the State of the Union take genre is the argument for some kind of technological or format innovation, livening up the speech or making it more relevant for contemporary life. Changes to format might broaden the audience or sharpen the message. But these fixes won’t change the capacities and constraints of the presidency as an office, and of the constitutional mandate that he present Congress with an assessment of the present and a plan for the future. The president is supposed to report on the state of the union. He can also change it, but the path lies through the political realities of the moment, not around them. Instead, it usually involves a long laundry list of issues and priorities, and when we’re lucky there’s a unifying theme. Frames that ask us to evaluate the speech in terms of things it’s not likely to do – change minds, sway Congress, patch up political difficulties – ignore what presidents are actually positioned to do.