I found the State of the Union to be a very odd document. Probably the worst State of the Union I’ve seen in my career.  There was no natural theme to it. He opened on Ukraine cuz how could he not? Then he bounced around to various ideas and topics. 

He basically repeated the left-wing values and policies, except for an occasional, you know, jump towards the middle cuz there’s an election coming up.  

So all of a sudden after two and a half million people crossed into the United States illegally in his first year, we have to control the border. Terrific sentiment. Then he explained what he would do, which made no sense, frankly, and wouldn’t control the border. 

He has figured out for the dramatic rise in crime that the Soros-funded district attorneys aren’t working out very well and that left-wing ideas, like why don’t we release murderers to see if they feel better, doesn’t work out very well.

And so now he is for funding the police, not defunding the police.  I didn’t see how many Democrats applauded that wildly, but, of course, Republicans were pretty happy with it, but we’ll see if it means anything, particularly in places like Seattle, Portland, where literally the police forces are disintegrating because they have no public support, no budgets, and they have no operational ability to do anything. They’re just targets.

So, I watched it all.  I was fascinated with the effort by the Democrats to have a coordinated, enthusiastic response. You could see this in part from Nancy Pelosi who kept jumping up and down. And if you turn on a tape of this and watch it with the sound off and just watch Pelosi, it’s really a strange kind of phenomenon. I’ve never seen a Speaker of the House who was quite as enthusiastic and excited as she was. And it got worse towards the very end where she almost couldn’t contain herself. 

The opposite of the time that she cut up Donald Trump’s State of the Union. 

My favorite example was Chuck Schumer who apparently got his script wrong, thought he was supposed to stand up and applaud and he gets, he stands up and he gets his hands about to here and suddenly realizes, oh, this isn’t the moment to do that.

He looks very foolish and very self-aware that he just did something that’s pretty stupid and sat back down. 

But I thought it was an example of just the tenor of the whole evening, which, I thought in the end almost certainly it either didn’t move the needle at all in terms of Biden’s popularity or actually lowered it a little bit because it was such a bad general performance. 

You know, he didn’t mention Afghanistan, he didn’t mention the 13 gold star families who lost loved ones in the American military in Afghanistan. 

He didn’t really take seriously the kind of problems we’re having with inflation. At one point, he had this goofy line where he said, you know, companies should control costs, not lower wages. Well, what does that mean? I mean, for most companies, 70 or 80% of the costs is in fact the cost of people working. So if you’re gonna have ’em lower costs, there’s a real danger that they’re gonna lower the cost by having fewer people working, and you couldn’t quite figure out what’s he talking about?  

And then he and randomly goes by and says, you know, there are only four major meat producing meat packing companies. Now that could have been the beginning of five minutes. This is what’s wrong with that. This is what they’re doing. This is how I’ll fix it, but it’s kind of a throw away line like everybody’s supposed to know what that means.  

Now, in fact, when Trump was president, there were four major meat packing plants or companies that they’re huge companies that have multiple plants. Didn’t seem to be a problem.

But the left is desperate to find a way to explain that the high, high prices aren’t because of government spending. They’re not because of Federal Reserve putting out too much money. They must be because the private sector’s gouging you. So somebody’s guilty.  

The other thing that was really obvious, if you go back and you read the section on energy, it verges on insane. At one point he says, if you really want to control the high cost of gasoline, you know, why don’t you get an electric car, and you’ll save $80 a month at the pump.  

Now,  he doesn’t indicate how much you’ll spend in electricity, and in a state like California, if everybody got a electric car tomorrow morning, the whole, the electric system would collapse and nobody could go anywhere, cuz it wouldn’t be any electricity.

And by the way, a lot of the electricity comes from coal, which has actually got more carbon than natural gas or oil and certainly more than nuclear power. 

But it is, it is this kind of stuff. And then, and then he went off on, on the whole notion that, he was really gonna move decisively on the price of oil by releasing 30 million barrels from our national reserve. Now remember the national reserve is there for an emergency. This is not an emergency. This is a moment of political and policy stupid.

So what did the market think? Were they impressed? Well, first of all, you have to understand 30 million barrels is one and a half days of American consumption of oil. So the big Biden moment represents 36 hours of American oil consumption. 

Second, everybody who is sophisticated in the oil market knows that, so the reaction of the market was to go up, not down. 

I think it’s gained something like $17 a barrel since Biden first announced this, and probably gonna keep going up because what Biden signaled was, no, I am not going to adopt a rational policy. I am not going to expand American production.

I’m not gonna go back to Trump’s American independence on energy, and I’m not gonna allow Americans to ship liquified natural gas to Europe to replace the Russian’s. Well, at that point, people thought, fine. It just means the Russians will continue to make a billion dollars a day or more. Now that it’s gone up another $17, they’re making more than a billion dollars a day. 

So you have sanctions, we’re being very tough, but on their biggest single product, they’re making twice as much, more than twice, as much as they made under Trump. Trump got the price of oil down to $46. It’s now I, as of the last time I looked $117. All the difference is profit for Putin. That’s the consequence of the Biden policy. 

And I thought the speech was about as good as the policy.