Biden’s known for being long-winded. Here’s how long his first State of the Union was.
Bill Clinton still holds the record for the longest State of the Union speech.
President Joe Biden is not known for brevity, but he delivered a State of the Union address Tuesday pretty much in line with other presidents since the 1960s, clocking in at 1 hour and 2 minutes.
The average State of the Union has been about an hour after 2000, according to a POLITICO analysis of data from the American Presidency Project. Biden largely spoke on-script with his prepared remarks on Tuesday night, though with some notable off-the-cuff quips about deer wearing Kevlar vests and repeating a call to “fund” the police.
Bill Clinton holds the record for the longest State of the Union speech at nearly 1 hour and 29 minutes in 2000, according to the project.
Biden’s loquaciousness is well-documented. In January, he plowed past the longest-lasting press conferences by his predecessors with a 1 hour and 51-minute prime-time event, compared to Donald Trump (1 hour and 26 minutes) and Barack Obama (1 hour and 27 minutes).
But Biden’s first State of the Union was the fourth-longest of the seven most recent presidents’ first speeches, according to C-SPAN. Trump spoke for more than 1 hour and 20 minutes in his first State of the Union in 2018.
And it was a few minutes shorter than his first joint address to Congress last year, which lasted 1 hour and 5 minutes, according to the American Presidency Project. That speech isn’t technically deemed a “State of the Union” address.
As many State of the Union speeches do, Biden’s address Tuesday touched on a wide range of topics, from Covid-19 to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to police reform. His prepared remarks totaled 6,476 words.