Joe Did What? Welcome, Welcome, Welcome

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images via Wisconsin Examiner. Rumor has it that when Donald Trump sent out a post "WHAT HAPPENED TO NANCY?" last night it's because he'd forgotten why the guy in glasses was sitting in Speaker Pelosi's chair.

Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were—are, I suppose—masters of oratory, in their different ways, artists of the art of public speaking, Clinton charming you into his vision, Obama rousing you to fervency, but their State of the Union addresses were never their best speeches, weighed down with all the exhausting details they felt compelled to include. 

Joe Biden's art is not oratory but the art of governance, of which the State of the Union is a (sort of) constitutional part (of course the Constitution only requires him to send Congress a letter, of which he made a tremendous pantomime last night, passing the Vice President and Speaker their leather-bound copies before bringing his own to the lectern, I've never watched that happening before, but the camera loved it as he was doing it), and that maybe accounts for why they're paradoxically his best speeches, even though they may be his longest; he's so deeply aware that he's not just talking about governance, he's doing it, and democratically drawing us into the process, and the details are a fundamental part of that (and not just the part where, as the pundits like to say, the Devil is). The pleasure he takes in it is so evident that we can't help sharing it, and it rarely gets boring.

I dwell on it because it's something people often make a mistake about when they're observing Biden: so many times in the course of the Gaza war they've complained that words are not enough, actions are needed, when words are what they're really asking for (the oratorical call for a ceasefire), and actions are what we're getting (the political work of making a ceasefire happen, going on mostly behind closed doors).

Action was the enveloping theme of last night's speech, surrounded as it was on both ends by scenes of Joe making his way through the crowd of legislators of whom he was one for such a long time, with a joke or a bit of gossip to share with everybody, working that crowd as the expression has it, and action was an important part of the content—instead of saying, "We must fight!" he spent a lot of time landing punches, against Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, against "my predecessor", the otherwise unnamed 45th president of the US, against the radical-right majority on the Supreme Court, and against the House Republican Caucus, and leaping right into debate with congressional hecklers, breaking from his prepared text to engage them. It's startling to see such pugnacity on display from a Democrat, and welcome, especially from one who gives as much space to the clichés of "finding common ground" and "working across the aisle" as he has always done.

Instead of the traditional opening on the economic state of the Union, he opened with an analogy to Franklin Roosevelt's SOTU of 1941, as a perilous situation comparable to the current set of threats foreign, as represented by Putin, and domestic as represented by Biden's predecessor

Now, now my predecessor, a former Republican president, tells Putin, quote, do whatever the hell you want. That’s a quote. A former president actually said that, bowing down to a Russian leader. I think it’s outrageous, it’s dangerous, and it’s unacceptable.

America is a founding member of NATO, the military alliance of democratic nations created after World War II to prevent, to prevent war and keep the peace. And today, we’ve made NATO stronger than ever. We welcomed Finland to the alliance last year, and just this morning, Sweden officially joined, and their minister is here tonight. Stand up. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome. And they know how to fight.

and by the insurrectionists who came out to support the predecessor on January 6, "stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger to the throat of American democracy."  As well as by the House Freedom Caucus blocking aid to Ukraine. Speaker Mikey Johnson, sitting behind the president in the traditional position next to the vice president, rose to his feet to applaud the Ukrainians, forgetting that he himself was responsible for bringing the aid bill to the House for a vote, which it would certainly win, if he disobeyed Trump's orders and did it, and quickly sat down again, confused, as he remained for the rest of the hour, though he was sometimes observed with his hands clapping under the table, where his Freedom members wouldn't see.

The first takeaway from all this has to be, I think, that Biden is in very good physical and mental shape and can show it. The event may have been "heavily staged", as some caviled on social media, but Biden played a very complex and rangy role, and one that took a lot of improv, and he couldn't have done it if he didn't have the capacity. Tim Franks on BBC asked a Democrat, "But will one speech be enough to convince people?" Really, it ought to be, given how well it was done, but it's clear in any case that from Biden's point of view the campaign just began, after the Tuesday primaries, and there will obviously be more. 

David Kurtz/TPM writes,

Republicans who have turned Joseph R. Biden into a caricature of falling-down dementia and drooling incontinence have set the bar so low that anything above a flatline EKG from the president knocks them back on their heels.

They were left spluttering that Biden’s State of the Union was too loud and too campaign-y.

And the White House team at The New York Times seems to have felt the same

Though he wasn't just loud, but made a brilliant use of stage whispers too.

While the rebuttal presented by Senator Katie Britt (R-AL), set in a soundstage kitchen apparently built in 1992 and never used to cook anything, looked like an audition for a high school production of The Crucible, designed to show her emotional range from very smily to deeply concerned, and not showing it well. 

Katie sez you can't trust those hardworking parents any further than you can throw them.

So much for the theater criticism. I'll try to get on to the substantive issues later.

Cross-posted at The Rectification of Names.