Who is Ron Klain kidding? If that’s the rescue Joe Biden and his team have planned for the midterm elections, then there’s only one possible strategy for Democratic incumbents ahead of the midterms:

As The Hill notes, this comes as part of Democrats’ delusions that their problems consist entirely of bad messaging:

White House chief of staff Ron Klain promised Senate Democrats that President Biden will deliver an uplifting and inspiring State of the Union address that will highlight his efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic and respond to rising costs.

Klain’s goal in addressing the Senate Democratic Caucus in person on Capitol Hill appeared to be to give lawmakers something positive to focus on instead of the president’s sagging poll numbers. …

Klain told senators that Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress next month will tout the president’s accomplishments from last year, which many Democrats believe are being undersold, and set a clear agenda for the rest of the year.

Needless to say, this doesn’t have Senate Democrats feeling warm and fuzzy about the prospects for a rebound:

Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said before the meeting that he hoped Klain would touch on the worrisome poll numbers, which could signal trouble for Democrats in the midterm elections.

Tester said before the meeting “he should bring it up.”

Yet Klain didn’t touch on Biden’s poll numbers and instead tried to pump up Democrats about what he predicted would be a glowing and powerful report on the State of the Union in 12 days, according to several senators who attended the meeting.

A “glowing and powerful report” about a country facing the worst inflation in 40 years, skyrocketing violent crime, and pandemic mandates with no off-ramps at all? Riiiiiiiiiight. If anything, such a “glowing and powerful report” is likely to accentuate and exacerbate the perceived disconnect between the elites in Panem and the voters in the districts finding empty shelves at the grocery stores.

Furthermore, the idea that a State of the Union speech offers opportunities for political resets largely exists as a fantasy of White Houses and editorial offices in media outlets. The Roman-triumph-esque SOTU spectacle offers nothing more than pomp and circumstance for the pompous and non-circumstantial. The speeches, with a couple of rare exceptions, are nothing more than regurgitated campaign speeches and wish lists that Congress routinely ignores. Even the exceptions require exceptional circumstances, such as the post-9/11 SOTU from George W. Bush, and the post-Lewinsky SOTU from Bill Clinton. Otherwise, they’re entirely forgettable.

Don’t take my word for it. Without looking it up, try to recall any specific worthwhile part of Joe Biden’s speech to the joint session a year ago (technically not a SOTU but still part of the genre). Anything come to mind? How about Trump’s SOTU from 2020? 2019?

FiveThirtyEight took a more data-driven look at SOTU speeches and their political impact in early 2020. They came away unimpressed, to say the least:

State of the Union addresses usually have little impact on public opinion of the president. Gallup’s regular polling of the president’s approval rating, which goes back decades, enables us to compare polls taken immediately before and immediately after the State of the Union to check for any popularity bumps we might attribute to the speech. But according to Gallup, the average State of the Union address since 1978³ has boosted the president’s approval rating by just 0.4 percentage points. In fact, a president’s approval rating is just as likely to go down as it is up after a State of the Union (the average movement in any direction is 2.7 points, which still isn’t very much). …

One reason why a State of the Union address may not change many Americans’ minds about the president is that the audience is disproportionately already fans of the president. Since at least the era of President George H.W. Bush, the people who have tuned in to watch the State of the Union have tended to be members of the president’s party, according to polls of viewers conducted shortly after the speech by Gallup, ABC News/Washington Post or CNN. For instance, last year, CNN’s sample of those who watched Trump’s State of the Union was 42 percent Republican, 22 percent Democratic.

That’s certainly one reason, which springs from the other — that there’s no real substance to SOTU speeches that one can’t find on the White House website. It’s a tired exercise in executive pomp and privilege, conducted in a manner befitting an emperor rather than an elected executive. Most of the time, the pomp drowns out the meager messaging that usually consists of a “who gonna believe, me or your lying eyes” vibe even in normal times.

And with inflation and shortages hammering American households, a “glowing” report about how good we have it will likely produce even more hostility in midterm polling than Democrats face now.

Klain may be selling Biden as an exception, but … come on, man. The big question in last year’s joint-session speech was whether Grandpa could stay alert through the whole thing, and he scored points merely by remaining upright. Biden has occasionally been pretty good at the podium, most recently in the 2012 Democratic convention, but he’s been terrible at it since taking office. Biden’s not Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, or even George W. Bush. About the best that Senate Democrats or any Democrats can hope is that he doesn’t do more damage and that he keeps his remarks as brief as possible.

If this is Klain’s strategy for saving the midterms, Democrats had better start practicing crash positions.