Joe Biden’s weaknesses are obvious, but the State of the Union last Thursday and the president’s $7.3 trillion budget proposal this week are reminders of just how tough he can be.

Biden isn’t simply an old politician, he’s an old-fashioned one — the kind who believes in buying the vote. He tried it in the 2022 midterms with a student-loan forgiveness push that had little chance of surviving the courts. (RELATED: TERENCE P. JEFFREY: Biden Really Wants Us To Believe He’s A ‘Fiscally Responsible’ President)

But it didn’t need to; all that mattered was convincing young voters they had a vested interest in the Democrats’ fortunes.

The Supreme Court shot down most of the scheme last year, but Biden took time in the State of the Union to remind indebted graduates of what he did get through. Donald Trump gets called a “transactional” politician, yet Biden is an absolute master of the traditional pork-barrel method of courting constituencies.

He learned something in his 36 years in the Senate, not least about the techniques that made Democrats the dominant party in Congress for decades after the New Deal.

When they ruled the House of Representatives for all but four years between 1931 to 1994 — and controlled the Senate for all but 10 — Democrats sold themselves as a party of government services, entitlements and payouts.

The culture war was a loser for them,........

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