When President Joe Biden launched his campaign last April, the first word he said was “Freedom.” As he delivers his most important speech as a re-election candidate on Thursday night, the president will return to the issue as a key pillar to support his position on the country.
Biden will do so very strongly, once again drawing on the example of one of his iconic predecessors. As the 46th president addresses the 118th Congress, he will refer to the 32nd president’s address to the 77th Congress, according to a copy of the speech visible in a photo posted in his office in X. In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt said he was speaking at an “unprecedented moment” in American history — months before the United States would enter World War II with the Great Depression still fresh in the mind.
The Biden team’s focus on freedom and threats to democracy as a defining election issue has often drawn criticism from allies, at a time when Americans’ perceptions of the economy and the 81-year-old president himself are also expected to dominate the months ahead.
Advisers understand the importance of Biden’s tradition of answering questions about his age and agree on the need to help better connect the administration’s economic agenda and achievements with improvements in the everyday lives of voters.
None of that will matter, however, if America’s democracy falters, a reality the president will categorically warn is possible, and one his advisers say voters have already responded to.
“There was language in the 2020 campaign that democracy and decency was on the ballot. There were voices who thought that was academic — too far-fetched — but now we’ve had two elections whose results prove it wasn’t,” historian Jon Meacham, an informal adviser to the president who helped him prepare his speech, said in an interview.
Roosevelt’s 1941 speech became known as his “Four Freedoms” speech. he defined what he called the “four basic human liberties” — of speech and expression, worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
Biden, who has a framed painting of Roosevelt prominently displayed in the Oval Office, has already offered his own version of the four freedoms for the 21st century. In a speech opening 2024, Biden said freedom itself was on the ballot this year.
“We’re going to vote on many issues: the freedom to vote and to have your vote counted, the freedom to choose, the freedom to have a fair shot, the freedom from fear,” he said near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
Each will be washed through his speech to Congress on Thursday, according to sources familiar with the speech, who stressed that it is still subject to further revisions.
Biden’s State of the Union address on Thursday will be full of symbolism and substance, with every policy discussed and even the tradition itself seen through the lens of November. But for the small circle of advisors who create the address, it’s pretty simple.
“This is a speech for Joe Biden,” a senior administration official said. Biden, they said, “will frame this moment in history and provide a path for the future.”
In the video announcing Biden’s re-election, he said the question facing Americans is “whether in the coming years we will have more freedom or less freedom. More rights or less.”
It was a consistent theme that predated the launch, however, one that Biden advisers felt became abundantly clear in the events of Jan. 6 — 80 years to the day of Roosevelt’s speech that Biden will address. And it was put into a new context with the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, which showed the threats to individual liberties more broadly.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who was traveling on a “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour, made this direct connection after the Dobbs decision came out, which overturned Roe v. Wade and the constitutional right to abortion.
“The great ambition of our nation has been to expand freedom, but the expansion of freedom is clearly not inevitable,” he said at the time. “It’s not something that just happens – not unless we stand up for our most fundamental principles.”
He repeated that Sunday during speeches in Selma, Alabama, calling the right to vote “the freedom that unlocks all others.”
In recent campaign appearances, Biden also warned that former President Donald Trump and his friends at MAGA are determined to take away our fundamental freedoms. And in advocating securing funding for Ukraine, Biden presented a choice: “Are you going to stand for freedom or are you going to stand with terror and tyranny? Are you going to stand with Ukraine or are you going to stand with Putin? Are you going to stand with America or — or with Trump?”
It shows what one Democratic strategist who works closely with the White House said was liberty’s outstanding quality as a matter — its flexibility.
“It’s certainly something that all the Democratic pollsters are testing more now, taking their cues from the speeches they’re hearing” from the administration, the general said. “The Republicans tried to run on that, but they became the party of banning books and banning LGBT clubs on school campuses, banning abortion and banning people’s rights.”
Republicans, of course, haven’t fully embraced the issue. South Dakota Gov. Christy Noem, a potential Trump running mate, used her State of the State address to highlight what she called her “freedom works here” agenda, including the “freedom to keep and bear arms,” the “freedom in agriculture”. and ranch,” and “freedom to be safe.”
But for Biden, freedom and democracy are intertwined as unique issues, in part because of the threat he believes Donald Trump poses.
“Democracy is nothing if it does not defend individual liberty against the whims and ambitions of an authoritarian power. So I think an argument for liberty is a natural extension of the defense of democracy because they are so closely related,” Meacham said. “Like any responsible president, President Biden has adjusted the intensity of the argument as the facts warrant. It’s an organic argument, not a static one.”