Biden confronts domestic woes in poll year

US President Joe Biden is signaling his efforts for an election year in his first State of the Union address, which came at a time of ballooning inflation at home and the White House's stalled domestic agenda.

While the conflict in Eastern Europe between Russia and Ukraine received top billing in the 62-minute speech delivered on Tuesday night, policing, the pandemic and inflation were major topics.

The confluence of pressing issues has renewed scrutiny of Biden's foreign and domestic policies and brought new challenges to his roller-coaster presidency in a high-stakes election year likely to put the direction of the nation at a crossroads once again.

On the lightning-rod issue of police funding, Biden delivered an offhand rebuke to his Democratic Party's progressive wing.

"We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police," Biden said.

Two years ago, nationwide protests erupted after the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020 sparked a "defund the police" movement nationally.

With FBI data showing murders rising 30 percent from 2019 to 2020 in the United States, the issue of resources allocated to policing has created a rift in the Democratic Party.

Biden also called for the pandemic not to divide people in the US, though he previously referred to the COVID-19 outbreak as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated".

The speech and setting demonstrated that the administration and Washington were largely ready to move on from the pandemic, as nary a mask was seen in the chamber. The mask mandate on Capitol Hill had just been rescinded, and the District of Columbia previously had rescinded most of its COVID restrictions.

Bleak milestones

However, the country is approaching bleak milestones of 80 million COVID-19 cases and 1 million related deaths, as many parts of the nation are easing mask mandates and other restrictions. "We must prepare for new variants," Biden warned.

Partisan observers suggested that the masks came off because of political polling showing the face coverings along with other COVID-19 measures were a losing issue heading into November's midterm congressional elections. Most US cities and states have rolled back the curbs.

Pocketbook issues are usually prominent in Biden's addresses, and that was the case on Tuesday, as inflation is perhaps Biden's most pressing domestic political issue.

"Already before the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the US had an inflation problem that was going to force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to get inflation under control," Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at think tank American Enterprise Institute, told Xinhua.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds delivered the Republican Party's response after the State of the Union address concluded.

"Instead of moving America forward, it feels like President Biden and his party have sent us back in time to the late '70s and early '80s, when runaway inflation was hammering families, a violent crime wave was crashing on our cities, and the Soviet army was trying to redraw the world map," she said.

Xinhua and agencies contributed to this story.