Analyzing the Rhetoric and Delivery of President Biden’s First SOTU

President Theodore Roosevelt famously called the U. S. presidency a ‘bully pulpit,” by which he meant a wonderful platform from which to talk to the country and the world about ideas. Never was that truth more in evidence than last night at President Biden’s first State of the Union address. He spent the first ten minutes or so talking about the war in Ukraine, coming out strongly in support of that country, NATO, and democracy. He mentioned sanctioning Russia economically, closing off U. S. airspace to all Russian flights, and assembling a task force to go after the Russian oligarchs and “their yachts, their luxury apartments, their private jets.” And he worked hard to paint Putin as an isolated warmonger to which the rest of the world was united in opposition.

Then, President Biden switched to the domestic agenda and the speech became much more typical of a State of the Union address, largely concerned with toting up the administration’s accomplishments to date and asking for legislation to push forward the political plans Mr. Biden still hopes to accomplish.

Perhaps surprising, given America’s recent history of highly partisan speech-making from this particular pulpit, Biden managed to find a fairly broad set of bi-partisan issues to talk about. The infrastructure bill, the “Made in America” theme…