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Opinion
editorial

Biden’s divisive speech helped neither the nation nor him

By
Post Editorial Board
Published Sep. 10, 2021
Updated Sep. 10, 2021, 11:39 a.m. ET

Wow, did President Joe Biden deliver a stinker of a speech Thursday, one guaranteed to fail both its supposed purpose of speeding the nation to final victory over COVID and its true goal of bolstering his poll ratings.

The central problem is that he spoke only to those of the vaxxed who resent the unvaxxed. It oozed contempt and struggled to be coherent.

Yes, he rightly described the vaccines as safe and awesomely effective, and urged everyone who hasn’t yet to get jabbed, but he also boasted, “We’re going to protect the vaccinated from unvaccinated co-workers.”

Huh? The danger there is zero, because the vaccines work.

By pandering to baseless fears of those who’ve already done the right and smart thing, he gave the reluctant one more reason to doubt the jabs truly work.

He simply hectored the unvaxxed, and we seriously doubt he persuaded any of them. He overtly painted vaccine hesitancy as purely partisan, and his castigating of “pandemic politics” reeked of hypocrisy.

These people aren’t risking death to prove some political point; they have real reasons for doubt, which make sense to them. But none of his much-vaunted empathy went into understanding and then overcoming their objections.

This wasn’t the speech of a unifying president and neither was it a speech to the American people. Instead it was the speech from the leader of a political party, a party still to prove it can govern and not simply campaign. 

And the “six-prong” strategy he advanced? It appears toothless on all fronts. His mandate for federal and federally funded workers to get jabbed comes with a 75-day grace period, which means 2½ months before it has much effect — and even then, the cumbersome federal discipline process will take more weeks to make resisters feel any pain.

Similarly, his order for employers to require jabs can’t take effect until endless federal rule-making procedures work out. And that’s at best: The courts might well strike the whole order down.

Other “prongs” were even more pathetic: His bid to make tests more available, for example, doesn’t even address the fact that the major bottleneck now is simply producing them, not having more places where you could get them … if they were in stock. His “prong” about boosters didn’t even involve any news.

And Biden’s timing is damning: The vaccine effort slowed months ago; why didn’t he give some speech like this after he failed to meet his July 4 goals? Meanwhile, the dangers of Delta are already fading; what, exactly, makes action urgent right now?

In fact, the policies and the speech are plainly a bid to seem like he’s leading at a time of crisis because much of the nation is furious at how he bungled the Afghan exit and worried about the hostages he left behind.

But his speech won’t make those Americans forget, any more than it will coax the unvaxxed. This arrogant, clumsy effort to score political points did nothing to help the nation or him.