President Biden Gives a Pep Talk for Still-Unusual Times

This address was “just a little bit different” from last year, because of the pandemic — and the change of speaker.

“This gathering is just a little bit different,” President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said Wednesday night, opening his first address to a joint session of Congress. It was certainly different from the last time that we’d seen a president speak in this setting, in February 2020, and not only because of the pandemic that has swept the globe since then. When Mr. Biden took the stage, he looked out on a room holding a fraction of the usual crowd but full of visual metaphors for the difference a year makes. And he played off those images with a speech that both painted the country as coming back from a tough year and called for longer-term changes, in a tone of optimism. The camera showed a room half empty; his speech saw a room half-full. (OK, technically, it was about one-eighth full.)