The annual presentation of the American president’s wish list, one that never comes to fruition, commences tonight in the well of the House of Representatives as Joe Biden will deliver what we can only hope is his final State of the Union message.
This particular speech increasingly has become a useless affair. Even the most diehard political observers would be hard-pressed to come up with a State of the Union address delivered by a president of either party that had any meaningful impact on policy, or even a rhetorical line that’s worth remembering. For me, the last line from a SOTU speech I can recall was the Axis of Evil section of George W. Bush’s 2002 address. It was just a few months after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C., and it was a moment of clarity to identify the coalition of immediate threats the United States faced.
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The ironic part about today’s world that Joe Biden has helped create is that there actually is an axis of evil very much allied against our interests – China, Russia, Iran, with junior partners in Venezuela and North Korea. But the chance of Joe Biden going down that road and talking in stark terms about national security and our need to beef up our military capabilities to combat it is about as likely as the President accepting responsibility for creating an open border that resulted in the death of Laken Riley in Georgia. It just won’t happen.
So what do we expect out of the exercise tonight? Well, there’s the physical aspect of it, and then there’s what will be said, and finally, what won’t be said. First, the physical.
Joe Biden is a very old man. He is physically slowing down. You see it in his gait, you see it in his posture, you hear it in his voice, and you see it in his declining energy. You have eyes. You have a brain. You can process what your eyes and ears report to you. The bar of expectations, based on recent Biden public appearances, is very, very low. If Joe Biden makes it to the podium and gets through the speech without falling and breaking a hip or having his upper denture plate dislodge 10 minutes in, it’ll be perceived in regime media as the comeback story of the century. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC is taking the over on Biden expectation game.
Here’s the problem with Joe’s analysis. No one believes it. Even decades ago before the physical decline of Biden began to manifest itself, he was never considered to be the brightest candle in the chandelier. Former Bush and Obama cabinet official Robert Gates famously said in his memoir, Duty, that Joe Biden hadn’t been right about a single foreign policy decision in 40 years. And that was ten years ago. Biden’s streak of being wrong continues into its golden anniversary jubilee year.
The Joe Biden we’re most likely to see tonight is the one that is clearly on some cocktail of Red Bull, Aricept, and a pinch more of that powder Robin Williams begged for from the pharmacist in Awakenings to get Robert DeNiro up and going. He’ll be peppier than normal, and then the White House will call a lid until next Tuesday so he can sleep off the hangover.
As for the overarching theme of what we’re supposed to hear, it’s apparently going to be Joe Biden discussing the 800-pound gorilla in the corner – the memory problem. Not Joe Biden’s failing memory, mind you. Yours. You have the memory problem. Here’s Jonathan Karl of ABC News, purportedly a reporter, telling his fellow lefties on the View what the Democratic message will be.
If you ever wanted to see a glaring example of the hive mind mentally amongst regime media, Karl isn’t the only person with this take. Here’s the New York Times from Wednesday morning.
Not all that long ago, many Americans committed hours a day to tracking then-President Donald J. Trump’s every move. And then, sometime after the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and before his first indictment, they largely stopped.
They are having trouble remembering it all again.
More than three years of distance from the daily onslaught has faded, changed — and in some cases, warped — Americans’ memories of events that at the time felt searing. Polling suggests voters’ views on Mr. Trump’s policies and his presidency have improved in the rearview mirror. In interviews, voters often have a hazy recall of one of the most tumultuous periods in modern politics. Social scientists say that’s unsurprising. In an era of hyper-partisanship, there’s little agreed-upon collective memory, even about events that played out in public.
But as Mr. Trump pursues a return to power, the question of what exactly voters remember has rarely been more important. While Mr. Trump is staking his campaign on a nostalgia for a time not so long ago, Mr. Biden’s campaign is counting on voters to refocus on Mr. Trump, hoping they will recall why they denied him a second term.
Axios this morning reports that the President will give a feisty speech to remind people things were worse under Trump.
President Biden will use tonight’s State of the Union address to admit that prices are still too high in some areas — but argue things were worse under former President Trump, White House chief of staff Jeff Zients tells Axios.
Why it matters: Biden, in what could well be the most important speech of his presidency, aims to project fighting optimism to an audience with plenty of doubts about the nation’s vigor — and that of the 81-year-old president.
Biden needs a cure for what some advisers call “Trump amnesia” — the notion that the chaos and unpopularity of Trump’s presidency has receded from some voters’ memories nearly four years on.
Roughly 435 sitting members of Congress, almost 100 Senators present, several members of the cabinet, the Supreme Court sending a delegation, military brass, plus invitees in the gallery above the chamber, and the person in the room with objectively the worst memory in the room – one that doesn’t know when, where, or under what circumstances his oldest son died, one that believes he contracted cancer and asthma from oil rain on the windshield simultaneously in Pennsylvania and Delaware, one that believes he traveled the Tibetan plateau with Xi Jinping, that he taught classes at Pennsylvania, all of the dozens of false memories he has, Biden’s the one who’s going to presumably tell 320 million people their memory is bad. Good luck with that.
For most Americans, their lifespan is a linear timeline where you can plot important points in their life. For Joe Biden, his timeline no longer is in a straight line. It’s kind of an oscillating circle these days. It wanders from past to present sometimes in the same sentence of a speech. He confuses years when he was vice president and when he wasn’t, sometimes under oath, and that lack of a grip of reality is the basis for why Special Counsel Robert Hur refused to bring charges against the President for his mishandling of classified documents. And Biden is further hindered by being surrounded by incompetent staff. Here’s the President’s Twitter/X message promoting the SOTU.
Does Biden know what year it is? pic.twitter.com/RdyJQy9MJz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 6, 2024
Sir Alec Guinness was 62 when he filmed the first Jedi mind trick in 1977’s Star Wars. He had the charisma to pull it off. Joe Biden doesn’t. People remember the COVID pandemic, and how much things sucked during the lockdown. They also remember it sucked specifically because things were going really, really well right before it. And that had a lot to do with Trump tax cuts, slashing the regulatory state, and the economy cooking with virtually no inflation and full employment. For the President to admit things are tough now, but things were worse then, that’s a hard sale to make.
What won’t be said tonight? Laken Riley’s name will not be mentioned. Outside of blaming the Republicans for Biden policy that has resulted in a human catastrophe not just at the Southern Border, but in virtually every city and town as second and third-tier consequences of crime, homelessness, drugs, gangs, and sex trafficking are ravaging the country. What won’t be said tonight? Biden will not admit his Iran policy was a failure that led to mass instability in the Middle East. He won’t condemn Hamas and Hezbollah and stand firmly behind Israel unabashedly. He will not admit that inflation skyrocketed after his spending bills became law.
I’m torn on how I want this to go tonight. As a radio producer always mining for show prep, a senior moment in the well of the House would be spectacular for the radio business. As an American who cares deeply about national security, I actually want Biden to deliver the address without incident. I’ll never agree with one lick of policy he espouses, but we don’t want our enemies to see Biden fuzz out mid-speech and do a mental reboot. As a Republican, we want Biden’s speech to go off without a hitch, because we want Joe Biden on that ticket. We need Joe Biden on that ticket.
There will, of course, be a live thread on HotAir to follow all of the highlights and lowlights of the speech, along with the hot takes afterwards.
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