Biden reset and delivered on one of his most important speeches | Opinion

Just hours after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, we learned the country had produced 275,000 jobs in February. That added to the historically high job creation figures we’ve seen during Biden’s first term. Many Americans likely didn’t know about that record, though, because the media and Biden’s opponents have been busy getting us to focus on his age.

That Biden didn’t drool or take a nap midway through his talk may have shocked Americans who have been listening primarily to those unethically diagnosing Biden’s cognitive abilities through the TV screen. To them, he’s so unaware of the world around him, he likely can’t find his pants, as South Carolina’s Nancy Mace once cracked.

What the country saw was an old man with a stutter delivering one of the most important speeches of his political career so well that it turned heads and changed minds. According to a CNN poll, after the speech 62% of viewers said Biden’s policies will move the country in the right direction. That number was only 45% before Biden began speaking.

While Biden’s speech was receiving widespread praise, a State of the Union rebuttal delivered by a much younger U.S. senator from Alabama was being mocked as akin to a skit from “Saturday Night Live” or “The Daily Show.” Age, as I’ve argued before, is the wrong metric to determine the effectiveness of a leader.

Thursday night was more proof why. And it showed why it is extremely important for voters to understand and keep that vital distinction in the forefront of their minds as we inch closer to November. Because if we don’t, policy proposals and accomplishments will be overshadowed by the political circus.

“The issue facing our nation isn’t how old we are. It’s how old are our ideas,” Biden reminded us all.

We should also know that during the Biden era, the child poverty rate had been cut in half. The Black poverty rate reached its lowest level ever, while the Black unemployment rate dropped to a record low.

Inflation dropped from its scary high without a corresponding jump in the unemployment rate, allowing the U.S. to avoid a recession long (but incorrectly) predicted by pundits and economists alike. The unemployment rate hasn’t remained below 4% for this long since the late 1960s — a feat more impressive considering that businessman Donald Trump was the first president to leave office with a net-negative job creation record since Herbert Hoover.

During Biden’s first term in office, a higher percentage of Americans acquired health insurance than at any other point in U.S. history. Nearly 4 million Americans have had about $138 billion in student debt forgiven. Biden wants to tax billionaires to help pay for child care, paid leave and eldercare, while Trump’s signature accomplishment as president was a massive tax cut that overwhelmingly benefited the wealthy.

Despite his personal beliefs about abortion, grounded in his Catholic faith, he wants to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land while Trump wants a national abortion ban that begins at about 16 weeks, that’s after Trump’s appointment of U.S. Supreme Court justices who uprooted Roe.

Biden also reminded us about the importance of peaceful transfers of power in a democracy. “You can’t love your country only when you win,” Biden said.

He was right to note that Republicans blocked an immigration bill that they initially championed so they could campaign on the chaos at our southern border. But Biden also momentarily gave into ugly right-wing rhetoric when he referred to a murder suspect as an “illegal.” No one is illegal, just as no one is trash. Biden later apologized for the slip-up in an otherwise well-received State of the Union address.

The best thing about his speech was that it provided a reset. We can get back to focusing on the issues that will shape this country over the next four years, which is more important than Biden’s birth date.

Issac Bailey is a Carolinas opinion writer for McClatchy.