Instead of outlining a legislative strategy to move beyond the Build Back Better bill, which Senator Joe Manchin killed late last year, Biden simply rebranded the bill. He didn’t mention the actual name of the bill, and then absurdly described it as his “plan to fight inflation” and claimed it would lower costs and reduce deficits. In reality, government subsidies do not reduce actual prices, and the CBO found that his plan would add $160 billion to the deficit. As ridiculous as it was to brand a multitrillion-dollar spending plan as an inflation-fighting measure, Biden outdid himself a few moments later when he called for a $15 minimum wage.

To the extent that Biden attempted any pivot, it came on the issue of Covid. Last week, the CDC completely overhauled its guidance for masking right in time for the State of the Union. Without any underlying change in the number of infections in the country, the CDC went from declaring 95 percent of the U.S. to be at significant enough risk to continue imposing mask mandates, to saying that 70 percent of the country was at low enough risk to rip off the masks. Biden — who pushed masking and supported the teachers’ unions in their fight to delay school reopenings — touted the ability of the country to remove masks and the importance of in-person school. “Thanks to the progress we have made this past year, Covid-19 need no longer control our lives,” Biden said. But in the past year, hundreds of thousands of people died of Covid, and there were multiple major surges. His change in tone has nothing to do with “progress,” but the fact that Democrats lost an election in Virginia and polling continued to show endless restrictions hurting Democrats.