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In today’s edition:

• What Biden should say in his speech — and how to say it
• Biden hasn’t done his one most important job. But if Trump can’t get Haley’s voters, it won’t matter.
• Justices love originalism as long as it’s convenient

SOTU to-do’s

Happy State of the Union night! It’s like the Oscars for politics, if the band supposed to play off overlong speeches got stuck in traffic. Our columnists, offering live commentary beginning at 8:45 p.m. Eastern, will be hanging on every syllable.

One of the silliest customs of the speech is the way the White House releases dribs and drabs of its content before publishing the full remarks at showtime. As of this newsletter’s publication, the latest is that President Biden will announce a U.S.-built port on Gaza’s coast to allow for more humanitarian aid.

That’s just in line with what Josh Rogin says Biden needs to do in the speech: break with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “reset both the policy and message” on the Israel-Gaza war.

Aid delivered by sea, however, is just the start of alleviating the humanitarian crisis, Josh writes, and Biden has two huge tasks awaiting after that; he must address how to (1) bring military action to an end and (2) set up a Palestinian-run government in Gaza. No big deal.

Well, what else is on Biden’s SOTU to-do’s?

Jen Rubin writes that the speech is less about what he says than about how he looks saying it. “As these speeches have devolved into laundry lists of accomplishments and proposals,” she writes, “the words mean less and the visual images mean more.”

She has just one task for Biden: Be combative.

Chaser: David Ignatius reports on the White House’s attempts to steer Israel away from a catastrophic offensive on Rafah in the south of Gaza — and back onto a two-way street with the United States.

Compare that with the 42,918 votes in three battleground states by which Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, Marc Thiessen writes in his analysis of how desperately the former president needs his longest-lasting opponent’s voters to win in the general election.

Trump caters almost exclusively to his MAGA base, Marc writes, but “MAGA voters are not going to decide this election,” no matter how weak Biden is going into it.

Marc’s advice for Trump on winning over the independents and establishment Republicans he needs? “Convince them that a second Trump term would be a return not to chaos but to competence; that he would use the presidency not to seek revenge but to restore our country.”

Right. By the same token, the election will be Biden’s as soon as he can crack aging backward.

In the meantime, Perry Bacon writes that Biden has fallen down on the single most important job he assumed as president: staying popular enough to keep Trump from having yet another shot at the White House.

In an alternate universe, Perry writes, Biden made “democracy issues a central focus of his presidency,” rather than trying to operate as the pragmatic policymaker of a past era. Would that have made him more popular?

Perry thinks so and even attaches a 52 percent approval rating to this counterfactual president. I still think it would have taken Biden’s Benjamin Button-ing to make any difference at all.

Chaser: Haley tried to warn the country against Trump. The Editorial Board plots out how Biden might find more success.

More politics

Last week, Ramesh Ponnuru wrote that nowadays, all judges are originalists. Today, Ruth Marcus says they’re all living constitutionalists! How do they keep up — is there a listserv?!

Ruth is looking at the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Trump’s Colorado ballot case and seeing a lot of consideration of unsavory real-world consequences. In her book, that makes for a “responsibly practical” outcome. But it’s anathema to the original-meaning-and-nothing-else approach that conservatives profess to love.

Could these justices hold … both philosophies? What judicial trick can allow such a seeming contradiction?

“Hypocrisy,” Ruth writes — ah — “in the service of a sensible outcome may not be the worst vice, but it shouldn’t go unremarked.”

Smartest, fastest

• Okay, I’ll be honest, you probably didn’t wait all year for this SOTU preview. Nor will you for next year’s. Maybe we should just listen to David Von Drehle and call the whole speech off.
• Cool the “gamblification” of U.S. sports, the Editorial Board writes. The betting industry is growing like crazy and needs smarter supervision.

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.

Without more ado,

The Union’s State goes to ... “Strong”!

Its 200th win!

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Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!