The State of the Union address doesn’t have to be delivered by the president in front of a joint session of Congress. That’s a touch of theatricality and politics added relatively recently to the constitutional requirement that presidents “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

Thomas Jefferson delivered his first State of the Union message in writing to both houses of Congress, to be read by the clerks in each chamber. He thought the leader of a republic should not do an American version of an English monarch’s tradition of speaking from the throne.

Woodrow Wilson is credited, or blamed, for the current tradition of delivering the State of the Union as a thundering address that announces the president’s agenda for the year. The writing of the speech is typically a committee project, each section showing the signs of lobbying by cabinet members, lawmakers and influential special interests.

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night was notable for its emptiness. The sections of the speech were like jars on a shelf, each labeled as something appealing, but what was in the jars didn’t exactly match what was on the labels.

Biden began by vowing to support the people of Ukraine as they defend their nation against a Russian invasion. The booming rhetoric about sending “an unmistakable signal to the world and Ukraine” quickly gave way to an explanation that the U.S. has mobilized ground forces, air squadrons and ship deployments “in the event that Putin decides to keep moving west.” To the Ukrainians, the president’s message was that “the next few days, weeks and months will be hard on them,” as Russian President Vladimir Putin “may make gains on the battlefield.”

“Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people,” Biden said, without correcting his geographic error. The “unmistakable signal” had a lot of noise in it on Tuesday night.

Biden’s speech contained other errors, as an AP Factcheck documented, incorrectly asserting that gun manufacturers “can’t be sued,” exaggerating the number of jobs Intel will create in Ohio with a new chip manufacturing facility and overstating the number of electric vehicle charging stations that will be built under his $1 trillion infrastructure law.

Perhaps the most empty and erroneous area of the speech involved inflation, a topic of grave concern to Americans, according to recent polls. Biden blamed high gas prices on the conflict in Ukraine, promising to “blunt” those price increases by releasing oil from strategic petroleum reserves. He also claimed that “one-third of all the inflation last year was because of automobile sales” and related to supply-chain issues with semiconductors, asserting that the solution to inflation was more U.S. manufacturing, which he said would be “cheaper.”

It isn’t cheaper, and it will become more expensive if the president realizes the goals he outlined to increase taxes on businesses, raise their costs by hiking the minimum wage and pass the PRO Act, a knock-off of California’s disastrous Assembly Bill 5, which virtually outlawed the use of independent contractors.

The president also slapped new labels of “fund the police” and “secure our border” on his existing policies, which made him sound like he had just come out of a meeting with his pollsters.

It’s all been said before. Next time, the president should just mail it in.