Opinion | Biden’s Speech Shows He Still Hasn’t Embraced the Presidency

After clearing their throats, political orators either preach a sermon to the converted from their pulpit or lean on the lectern to craft a lesson designed to persuade the doubters.

Thursday night, in a rare prime-time address to the nation, President Joe Biden could have engaged either strategy to advance his gun violence agenda. Unfortunately, he took the preacher path, even decorating the mise-en-scène with two rows of burning candles that flanked him like runway lights to mourn the gun-slain. The upside of his emotional appeal was that no Democrat and certainly no advocates of stricter gun control laws were disappointed by Biden’s heartfelt performance. He called for bans on assault-type weapons and high-capacity magazines, announced his support for red flag laws and stronger background checks, insisted that the legal age for purchasing assault-type weapons jump from 18 to 21, and more.

The downside of the speech was greater. It’s hard to imagine that any of the gun rights faithful were swayed by Biden’s talk, as he provided no new argument for the cause of gun control, and aside from the recent examples of gun massacres, no new compelling data. As a veteran horse-trader from his years in the Senate, Biden knows all about high-stakes compromise, negotiation and persuasion. If the speech contained a persuasive lesson about gun control, it must have been written in code. Although Biden directed his comments primarily to the citizenry, he also appealed to members of the Senate Republican minority — the people he must reach in order to pass such new, politically ambitious measures. But nothing in his call to action showed the slightest promise of moving them; it provided them no political reward for switching. Biden neither menaced the Republican senators with threats nor caressed them with promises or compromises that might have split off a Republican supporter or two. Unless you are already one of Pastor Biden’s congregants, his words, his expression of sorrow and his emotional pleading came across as the usual Democratic Party white noise. Filled with good intentions that he drove into a semantic dead end, Biden sounded like a bad Aaron Sorkin speech. Why did he even bother with his address?

Like many presidents before him, Biden has yet to complete the transformation from being a presidential candidate — a status he has enjoyed off and on since announcing his first campaign 35 years ago — to president of the United States. You would think that after being president for 17 months, he might have learned the difference, but no. During the first months of caucuses and primaries, a presidential campaigner speaks almost exclusively to members of his own tribe, telling them what they want to hear and never deviating too far from the party’s orthodox positions. Once nominated, the candidate has more leeway. Not every speech should be a sermon, because independents and political strays find such language off-putting. What’s more likely to move them to support a candidate is the persuasion contained in a lesson and the logic of a winning argument. If a candidate is lucky enough to win the White House and he doesn’t command overwhelming majorities in the House and the Senate to do his bidding, he must refine his powers of persuasion and sometimes coercion to bend members of the opposition.

No matter where you stand on gun control, it’s easy to criticize the tenor and flatness of Biden’s prime-time appeal, which sometimes better resembled a political tantrum than an appeal to reason. At eight points in his 16-minute address, Biden implored the nation to “do something” about the gun problem. Twelve times he pleaded, “Enough!” Rhetorical incantations like this sometimes do magic on the campaign trail, but they rarely do much to shape public opinion, let alone action on Capitol Hill.

Biden has frequently failed to convince the GOP, and his prime-time gun speech is likely to mark only his latest failure. As CNN congressional reporter Manu Raju commented after the Biden speech, Republicans vehemently oppose assault-type weapon bans and universal background checks. The notion that anything Biden said might cause the 10 Republican senators Biden needs to vote his way and overcome a filibuster is wildly unrealistic. “Joe Biden may ultimately get nothing,” Raju said, “despite his call for the laundry list of asks that he just made there.”

It’s no knock on Biden that he has yet to coax 10 Republican senators to embrace gun control activism. Congress, along with the rest of the country, remains divided. The president isn’t a superhero who can simply bend Washington to his will. It’s difficult to imagine either a President Sanders or a President Harris doing much better. But that’s his job. Biden could have used prime time to a give a speech that, to echo his pleas, actually “did something.” Instead of giving a speech that moved nobody, Biden could have advanced an incrementalist’s approach to gun control by focusing largely on an endorsement of the current bipartisan talks centered around new red flag laws, additional mental health funding and increased school security measures. Such baby steps might not prevent the next massacre, but they might build a foundation from which more effective laws might be passed.

It’s still not too late for the president to flip the switch into persuasion mode and flex his horse-trading skills again. As for additional preaching to the converted, here’s a bit of advice he should heed: Enough!

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Politics ain’t church. Send sermons to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts have no vacancies at the moment. My Twitter feed favors persuasion. My RSS feed is all coercion.