Who Gets to Decide If the Biden Speech Was Good?
Who Gets to Decide If the Biden Speech Was Good?
And who gets to decide if Dick Cheney is a good person?
Wide World of News is here to answer the four big questions all of you have:
1. How was President Biden’s speech?
2. Who failed to extend The Presumption of Grace on 1/6?
3. How is the federal pandemic response going?
4. How did Mike Pompeo actually lose all that weight?
Let’s take them in order and then let you get back to deciding if you feel safe going to a restaurant this weekend.
But first, a word from me.
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Now, your four answers.
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1. How was President Biden’s speech?
These things are always subjective.
For many extreme voices on the national town square, one’s professed take on how a presidential address went down and over is simply going to be a reflection of tribal instincts and perceived necessities.
Many Biden supporters (including those in the Dominant Media, who will cheer anything anti-Trump) raved about the speech.
Harvard Law’s Larry Tribe might not be the best example of this point of view, but he’s a darn good one:
Laurence Tribe, who has known Biden since the 1980s and has at times advised the president, spoke to Klain after Biden’s address, relaying his belief that the speech was Biden at his best.
“Equal to anything that JFK did or anything that Obama did,” Tribe recalled telling Klain. (Politico)
Maybe that perspective will be validated by history.
Here, for your consideration, is what Peggy Noonan thought:
I was not as impressed as others by the president’s speech Thursday in the Capitol. I wanted him to take on a kind of broad-gauged gravity that spoke of the attack of 1/6/21 in a way that didn’t make Trump supporters and many Republicans lean away from the first moments but start to lean forward, however reluctantly, even painfully, knowing that what they were hearing was wisdom.
A lot of people have a lot of admitting to do, most spectacularly Republican lawmakers on the Hill, but you’re not likely to win admission by a great public damning, and asserting in the most heightened language, on an anniversary. Wisdom, and a kind of high modesty that doesn’t seek to win the moment, was what was needed.
If I had to say who has better instincts about how a set piece of political rhetoric played in the moment – and its potential to have a real impact beyond the moment – I’d be inclined to take Noonan over Tribe.
Two Wide World of News readers with long track records of fairness and good judgment had views of their own:
I voted for Biden, but I feel Biden's speech today was mostly awful. It felt like the people who wrote his speech have been just as infected by the DJT virus as so many Republicans have been. He made it personal. He didn't come from a presumption of grace, and he papered over the real psychological and sociological challenges relating to conspiracy thinking with the inaccurate-and-unhelpful term "lies." He made it an "us-vs-them" narrative instead of a diagnostic and how we can move past it. There was precious little spiritual leadership, and a whole lot of prerogatives. I recognize that he was going for tough love, which is his brand, but I think he fumbled.
A true shame.
I am frustrated and sad.
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Mark: I was as outraged as anyone with what happened a year ago, but Biden did himself no good. It was too angry, too shrill and his delivery was not good. I would never advise anyone to make a stemwinder in that hall with the acoustics.
A speech was in order. But the content and how it is said is everything.
Is this about a forthcoming inflation report?
In the end, “Did Biden have the right tone?” matters less than “Did the speech change anything?”
Given the state of polarization, the news coverage, and the language employed, I would guess the answer to the latter questions is, No.
Maybe I will be wrong.
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2. Who failed to extend The Presumption of Grace on 1/6?
Too many to list here, but let’s offer up a couple of options for your consideration.
First, a top Bernie Sanders aide apparently has the view that the enemy of my enemy is (always and forever) my enemy (if said Enemy #1/#3 has a past):
Second, Glenn Greenwald, who is not an avid supporter of TPoG:
The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay" while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.
1/6 was not a big TPoG victory lap, but let’s all keep trying, please.
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3. How is the federal pandemic response going?
There remain some hopeful signs, but let’s just say that 1/6 was not the day that the public health crisis was solved.
* While the Washington Post says steps with contracts and the post office have put Team Biden closer to rolling out the 500 kits, the Wall Street Journal looks at the current high prices/low supply reality facing American families and doesn’t like what it sees.
* A bunch of former Biden COVID advisers made a slew of recommendations for fundamental changes in how things are being done now, suggesting a pretty thorough repudiation of the status quo. They won over my heart and mind with their call for a “modern data infrastructure” to track the disease, which, duh.
* Back to Peggy (Noonan), who is also unsatisfied:
Public-health advisories are confusing and contradictory and their spirit seems not to be “We must fully inform the people” but “We have to say something, let’s try this.” All public-health pronouncements now feel like propaganda….
The president often sounds to me like a man trying to perceive what the public wants and deliver it, which in fairness is what most politicians do. But he and his people are not necessarily good perceivers. On the pandemic, he isn’t sure if they want reassurance or an acting out of shared indignation or a stirring Churchillian vow—“I’m gonna shut down the virus, not the country,” he said during the 2020 campaign. But people know when you’re telling them what you think they want to hear, and they experience it as talking down to them. They wouldn’t mind that so much if they thought the politician talking down was their intellectual or ethical superior, but they don’t often get to feel that way.
A problem for the president is that when he tries to convey resolution or strength he often takes on tics—a lowered voice, a whispering into the mic, an overenunciation—that in his political youth were charming, but in old age are less so. I always thought in the 2020 campaign that his age was an unacknowledged benefit: the assumption was he must be moderate, old people are, what else is the point of being old? As he came in his first year to seem less moderate his age became less a benefit.
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4. How did Mike Pompeo lose all that weight?
Per a New York Post exclusive, the former secretary of state has been eating fewer calories and exercising more.
To paraphrase the immortal “When Harry Met Sally” line: I’ll not have what he’s not having.
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For all the latest news all the time, check out the 24/7 website the Walking Duck.
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Please find the typos herein charming and humanizing, rather than disqualifying.