Joe Biden’s primetime speech got everything right, but will it be enough to change any minds?
President has less than 70 days to make case to nation
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Your support makes all the difference.Joe Biden has been on something of a roll of late,
Inflation appears down, his approval rating is up, and special elections in Alaska and New York state have led some Democrats to think they might not only hold onto the Senate, but perhaps even the House.
With less than 70 days before those midterms, Biden on Thursday night put himself at the heart of efforts to deliver for the party, not only listing the achievements of his nearly two years in office, but drawing a very clear distinction of what is on offer to voters when they go to the polls.
Donald Trump himself does not have his name on the ballot in any of November’s races, but he has endorsed many of those taking part. And the spectre of Trump, the events of Jan 6 and the recent raid at Trump’s Florida mansion all hang in the air.
“As I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault,” Biden said in standing in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.
“We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise. So tonight, I’ve come to this place where it all began. To speak as plainly as I can, to the nation, about the threats we face. About the power we have in our own hands to meet these threats.”
And framing the coming election battle in perhaps the most clear and personal terms to date, he said that too much of what passed for politics in the country was “not normal”.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” he said.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, who thoughtlessly derided Trump’s supporters as “deplorables” when she competed with him in 2016, and scored an own goal, Biden was tip-toe careful to make clear he was not talking about all Republicans, or even most of them.
He was referring he said, to those who could not accept an election decision that they lost, and indulged in politics of “grievance”.
“MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards,” Biden said. “Backwards to an America where there is no right to choose, no right to privacy, no right to contraception, no right to marry who you love.”
Biden is 79 years old and he cannot think he is the future of the Democratic Party. But he made the case that the decision made by voters when they go to the polls on November would count for the ages.
“For a long time, we’ve reassured ourselves that American democracy is guaranteed,” Biden said. “But it is not. We have to defend it. Protect it. Stand up for it. Each and every one of us.”
Biden spoke for just less than 25 minutes. He appeared impassioned and fired up. He appears to believe the threat presented by Trump and his most loyal supporters, who just 600 days or so ago stormed the US Capitol to try and stop the peaceful transfer of power, are an existential threat.
As such, Joe Biden, bathed in a crimson light that gave him an almost rose neon glow, was about as authentic and powerful as he gets.
But the question its, will any of it make a jot of difference?
Biden likes to hark back to a perhaps imaginary time, when reasonable people could be won over by listening to an argument and going out to vote. The truth is that politics, in the US as elsewhere, has become increasingly polarised and fraught.
While Democrats may have liked what they heard, Trump supporters will most likely not have even listened.
But they will pay attention when Trump appears in nearby Scranton, Biden’s birthplace, for a rally this week.
Some may also have caught the remarks of MAGA loyalist Lauren Boebert who called on Biden to resign, or Kevin McCarthy calling for Biden to apologise for likening some supporters of Trump to fascists.
“In the past two years, Joe Biden has launched an assault on the soul of America, on its people, on its laws, on its most sacred values,” said McCarthy, whose memory of the assault on the building where he and his colleagues were seated and whose criticism of Trump marks one of the very briefest mini-epochs of US politics.
The best that Democrats can hope for tonight is that Biden made a case for people to go and vote, and that he will tap into the worries and concerns of sufficient numbers of voters to go out to the polls, even if he won over no new supporters.
If he did that alone, it will have been a major victory.
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