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THE BIDEN SPEECH
Actually, there appears to have been at least SIX Biden speeches.
This could be a matter of analysis and interpretation – or it is possible that there are a series of parallel universes in which a number of seemingly identical addresses were in fact fundamentally different.
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BIDEN SPEECH #1: The straight news coverage.
President Biden warned that former President Donald Trump and his allies are threatening to undermine the nation’s democracy, using a prime-time address to lay out his concerns for the country’s future when millions of Americans have questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
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BIDEN SPEECH #2: The best speech ever.
Biden offered a passionate defense of democracy, recalling Americans to their heritage: a fight for liberty that has preserved the nation through wars, depressions, and struggles to expand civil rights. That mission still drives us, he said, toward “an America that is more prosperous, free, and just.”
But “we must be honest with each other and with ourselves.”
Things are not normal, he said. And then he called out the elephant in the room: “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
As he has done in similar comments lately, Biden isolated the extremist MAGA Republicans from the rest of the country, while including mainstream Republicans in the larger body of Americans who still believe in democracy. But he acknowledged the truth that “the Republican Party today is dominated, driven, and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans, and that is a threat to this country….”
Biden listed the accomplishments of the past year and a half and echoed the line he has used since he ran for president: “There is not a single thing America cannot do—not a single thing beyond our capacity if we do it together.”
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BIDEN SPEECH #3: The worst speech ever.
Wide World of News reader email:
From: REDACTED
Date: Thu, Sep 1, 2022 at 8:27 PM
Subject: The Great Unifier
To: Mark HalperinI guess Heather Cox Richardson is happy, along with the MSNBC crowd.
Pathetic abuse of a prime-time presidential address.
Paid political announcement.
I wonder if he really thinks he is going to change anyones minds. Would be over the top at the DNC
What a hodgepodge of thoughts -written by a committee – badly
Did someone hit – scramble – on his teleprompter…..
“We’ll come together as a nation”
Gag
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BIDEN SPEECH #4: It is all about Biden using Trump and Trump using Biden for 2022 and 2024.
Joe Biden has become America’s leading troll — and he’s trolling Donald Trump. The president’s supposedly grand speech in “defense of democracy” under attack by “Trump and the MAGA Republicans” was hardly a visionary call to renew our commitment to the Republic.
If it had been the highfalutin speech we were promised, Biden wouldn’t have spent ludicrous time praising himself for things like prescription-drug costs and burn-pit health coverage. No, this speech was nakedly, even comically, designed not to elevate but to offend — to poke and taunt and push his predecessor and his predecessor’s camp followers and acolytes into firing back about how evil Biden is.
To the extent the president can define himself as the last, best obstacle to Trump returning to the White House, it helps quell the extensive doubts about him within his own party. Biden is barely above 40 percent approval in polling averages, a nightmarish position that should doom his party in the midterms and himself in 2024, and yet he’s only down 2.2 percent in the RealClearPolitics average in a hypothetical rematch with Trump in 2024.
Trump is his life preserver and comfort blanket, providing a political boost based on the easiest political argument in the world — “See that guy over there obsessed with fanciful theories about the 2020 election? I may not be a very good president. But at least I’m not him….”
Trump and Biden compensate for each other’s problems, and they are effectively working together to get Trump nominated — which Trump wants because it’s the necessary precondition for winning a second term and Biden wants because Trump would be the riskiest GOP candidate in a general election.
It’s not the most edifying relationship. Indeed, it’s a de facto partnership toward a demoralizing rerun of 2020. But neither Trump nor Biden is as likely to get where they want to go without the other.
Republicans were not really Mr. Biden’s target audience in any case. For all his expressed hopes of bringing the country together, the president and his team have come to accept that 40 percent of Americans are beyond his reach, unwilling to listen. And so Mr. Biden was speaking not to them but to the 81 million Americans who formed the coalition of Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans he assembled two years ago, hoping to bring them out for his favored congressional candidates….
The White House concluded long ago that it could not win simply by promoting Mr. Biden’s legislative record, even as his aides argue that he has accomplished a lot on infrastructure, climate change, health care and other issues.
The president’s team determined that Democrats would win only by making Americans see the other side as too dangerous to let back into power. In American politics in the Biden-Trump era, that debate is the new normal.
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BIDEN SPEECH #5: Man bites dog as Biden allies/Dominant Media are critical of the political nature of the event.
Aides stressed that the speech, given just days before the unofficial Labor Day kickoff to the stretch run of the midterm campaign season, would not be overtly political. But it was difficult to read it as anything other than Biden’s attempt to frame the stakes of an election once again dominated by Trump after an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago home turned up classified information and intensified talk of possible criminal charges for the former president.
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BIDEN SPEECH #6: The remarks that did not bark in the night.
Not even PBS covered the speech live, even as CNN and MSNBC turned it into State of the Union II.
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Meanwhile, remember that House Republicans still plan to unveil their agenda (a/k/a “The Contract With America, Circa 2022”) at some point soon. Speaker-in-Waiting Kevin McCarthy joined this week’s high-level parade to Pennsylvania with a prebuttal speech in Scranton on Thursday.
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