‘A crisis usually enhances a president’: Ukraine gives Biden opportunity to lead at State of the Union address as poll numbers sag

On Tuesday night, Biden again will deliver a prime-time address to the nation, this time after a challenging first year in office where the possibility and opportunity he promised were tempered by two deadly COVID variants that prolonged the nation’s battle against the virus.

There is peril, still, in the lingering pandemic and decades-high inflation. A crisis is raging in Ukraine. And Biden has faced setbacks in the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal and his mostly stalled legislative agenda that have driven his approval rating to its lowest levels.

But the State of the Union speech offers him the opportunity to reset his struggling presidency, analysts said, and change the conversation away from the issues that dogged his first year. The war in Ukraine gives Biden the chance to rally the nation against Russian aggression while his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court on Friday opens the door for a historic political win that could energize Democratic voters ahead of the November midterm elections.

“Biden has a moment here to make the pandemic and inflation secondary and really talk about how he represents the democratic nations of the world … and no matter what we must prevail over authoritarians in any guise,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.

“Momentum is everything in presidential politics and a crisis usually enhances a president,” he said. “You’ve got to put all your chips on this speech.”

The Ukraine crisis allows Biden, who has expertise there and served for years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to demonstrate his strength as a leader, said John Anzalone, who was a top pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign.

“This is Biden’s wheelhouse,” Anzalone said of foreign policy. “I don’t think he looks at it as an opportunity. I think he looks at it as this is what presidents do, they step up and lead.”

Biden desperately needs some positive momentum as the nation has struggled to return to normalcy, as he pledged it would. His approval rating in some polls has plummeted below 40 percent since last summer as COVID cases surged again in recent months and he’s faltered in two areas touted as his strengths: foreign policy and congressional deal-making.

“His core promise was the other guy is a clown and hired ‘The Addams Family.’ I’m a professional and I hire professionals and we’re not going to make these mistakes,” Republican political consultant Doug Heye said of Biden’s campaign message against Donald Trump. “Afghanistan really took the bloom off that. That’s a genie that’s hard to get back in the bottle.”

A Washington Post/ABC News poll released over the weekend showed the depths of Biden’s troubles. His overall approval rating reached a new low of 37 percent. Just 36 percent of Americans said they thought Biden was a strong leader and only 40 percent said he had the mental sharpness to be an effective president.

But the poll also indicated an opportunity for him in the Ukraine crisis. Two-thirds of respondents said they supported economic sanctions against Russia by the United States and its European allies. And eight in ten said they viewed Russia as unfriendly or an enemy to the United States.

Political historian Allan Lichtman of American University said Biden must be more forceful in drawing a line against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggression and needs to convince the American public of the importance of standing up to him.

“This isn’t just some far-off war in a place you couldn’t plot on a map. This directly affects our well-being,” Lichtman said. He believes Biden is up to the task, calling him “a pretty effective communicator.”

“He’s not Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, but he’s not bad,” Lichtman said.

Representative Katherine Clark, the Revere Democrat who serves as assistant House speaker, said she hopes Biden highlights his successes — including passing a sweeping COVID relief package and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.

“This has been a historically challenging time for Americans and he has met that historic challenge with historic progress,” she said. “I hope he will lay that out for the American people, about how far we’ve come in the first year of his presidency and his commitment to seeing it through and meeting the ongoing challenges that families are facing with solutions.”

Biden will likely highlight progress on COVID as the nation emerges from the worst effects of the Omicron variant. As a sign of hope for a return to normalcy, Biden will be speaking to a House chamber with no social distancing or mask requirements after revised guidelines last week from the Centers for Disease Control that classified Washington and most of America as a low-risk areas.

But addressing the Ukraine crisis should be a crucial part of the speech, Brinkley said, and would allow Biden to recast himself as a war-time president even if US forces are not fighting there. He noted that the public didn’t view Reagan as strong on foreign policy in early 1984, but he reversed that with an inspirational speech in Normandy, France, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

“He soared up in the public estimate because of the way he talked about the liberation of Europe and democracy and our armed forces,” Brinkley said. “Reagan became a foreign policy president without going to war.”

Biden could do the same thing on the Russian invasion of Ukraine by highlighting the stakes for the US and other democracies and demonstrating he is “ideally suited to be a commander in chief at a moment of peril when we must avoid World War III,” Brinkley said.

“What Biden has going for him is that he’s not disliked, but there has been a creeping feeling that he’s too old and perhaps inept,” he said. “So he has to present himself as vigorous Joe Biden, who is the right voice to promote our democratic values at a time when authoritarianism is rearing its ugly head in Eastern Europe.”

Many Republicans have criticized Biden’s handling of the lead-up to the Ukraine war, arguing he wasn’t forceful enough in dealing with Russia and emboldened Putin with how poorly the United States handled the Afghanistan withdrawal.

“Sadly, President Biden consistently chose appeasement and his tough talk on Russia was never followed by strong action,” House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and other GOP leaders said in a joint statement last week after the invasion began.

Heye doesn’t think there’s much for Biden to gain politically in showing leadership now on Ukraine given the invasion happened on his watch. But he said Biden needs to project strength in his State of the Union address.

“He needs the voters to look at him and say, ‘I’m comfortable with this man leading us forward through this crisis,’ “ Heye said.

Jim Puzzanghera can be reached at jim.puzzanghera@globe.com. Follow him @JimPuzzanghera.