EVERY WOULD-BE president daydreams of the moment: the very first state-of-the-union address to Congress, the chance to be at the centre of the annual American pageant. After 50 years in Washington, and having attended a fair few of the spectacles himself, President Joe Biden will have fantasised about his turn at speechmaking more than most. The reality, however, was hardly triumphant.

After a little more than one year in office, Mr Biden is in a slump. Setback has piled atop setback. After months of agonising negotiations, the signature legislative agenda of the administration—a gargantuan safety-net and climate-change spending package called Build Back Better—is in effect dead. High inflation, exacerbated by the large fiscal stimulus that Mr Biden signed, has wrecked his standing as an economic steward. Having promised to manage the pandemic better than his predecessor, Mr Biden has found himself at the mercy of covid-19 variants. And his supposed core competence in foreign policy has looked questionable since the chaotic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. A fresh crisis in Ukraine now demands his attention.

Voters are unimpressed, and ready to punish his Democratic Party in the mid-term elections to be held in November. Mr Biden’s net approval rating is minus 11 percentage points. That makes him precisely as unpopular as Donald Trump had become at this point in his presidency.

The importance of the state-of-the-union address is questionable, despite all the attention it gets. Examine the swing in presidential approval ratings taken by Gallup, a polling outfit, before and after the spectacles over the past four decades, and you will find an average change of zero points. The recitation of the president’s wish list, as these speeches routinely descend into, has only an indirect relationship with actual policy. A careful study by a trio of political scientists—John Lovett, Shaun Bevan and Frank R. Baumgartner—found that popular presidents can successfully use the occasion to hector Congress into examining their agenda. “On the other hand, any powers of the president to influence the congressional agenda disappear completely when presidents lose their popular lustre,” they write. It is hard to imagine any speech capable of overcoming these realities, not to mention difficulties of partisan animus and gridlock, no matter how well-crafted or excellently delivered. Unfortunately for Mr Biden, his effort was neither.

The answers to America’s domestic ailments were unsatisfying. Mr Biden seems to have lost faith in his ability to legislate—not daring to mention even once the name Build Back Better. The president suggested that components of this sweeping legislation could still pass, in an uninspiringly half-hearted manner. Climate-change mitigation, a central campaign pledge, was relegated to occasional mentions. The recommendation that Congress reconsider already proposed legislation that stands no chance of passage, such as a pro-unionisation bill and Democrats’ preferred antidote to voter suppression, will prove to be lifeless. Mr Biden unveiled no major new pieces of domestic policy. His proposed solution to the problem of inflation was autarky and populism. “More goods moving faster and cheaper in America. More jobs where you can earn a good living in America. And instead of relying on foreign supply chains, let’s make it in America,” he said, to boisterous chants of “USA!” from Democrats. He also pledged a “crackdown on these companies overcharging American businesses and consumers”.

Although never regarded as a gifted orator, Mr Biden was in especially poor form, stumbling through both his scripted lines and ad libs. He spoke of the “Iranian people” when he meant Ukrainians, confused the word “vaccine” for “virus” and at one point substituted the phrase “corporate America” for his home state of Delaware. After the perfunctory closing line “May God protect our troops”, the president felt compelled to add a mystifying postscript: “Go get him!” (or perhaps, as some transcribed it, “Go get ’em!”), he shouted into the microphone.

The president was strongest at the start of his speech, denouncing Vladimir Putin’s war in stark terms and leading the assembly in a standing ovation for the Ukrainian ambassador. “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression they cause more chaos,” he said. There was chest-thumping over the success of the severe economic sanctions that America and its allies have imposed on Russia over its aggression (“He has no idea what’s coming,” Mr Biden said of Mr Putin), warmly received by members of both parties. But Mr Biden reiterated that he would not risk direct confrontation with the nuclear-armed state. Unusually for any big political question, Americans of all partisan stripes are in broad agreement with the president’s strategy. This unity has not yet translated into a higher approval rating for the president, though.

There were signs of cooling relations between the Democratic Party’s progressive and moderate factions. Having happily added progressive phraseology like “equity” and “environmental justice” to his administrative and personal lexicon, Mr Biden is now pointedly distancing himself from it. “'The answer is not to defund the police,” he said, lambasting a slogan that has now become a liability for Democrats running for office. “The answer is to fund the police,” he declared, scoring a rare standing ovation from Republicans. (He also drew their applause when he argued that: “If we are to advance liberty and justice, we need to secure the border.”) Rashida Tlaib, one of the members of the so-called Squad of progressive House Democrats, delivered her own response to Mr Biden’s speech (an act more often associated with the opposition) in which she blasted “just enough corporate-baked Democratic obstructionists” for stymying the president’s agenda over the past year.

If Republicans were to capture one of the chambers in Congress at the end of the year, this internecine squabble and its constant recriminations would be rendered academic. The current polling suggests this to be the likeliest outcome. Over his hour-long speech, Mr Biden managed to give no new reason to think otherwise.