What made Biden’s advisors/handlers think it would be a good idea to give this type of speech to all of America in prime time (although interestingly, the networks didn’t cover it)? Apparently, they think the time is right.
Of course, he’d already given a similar one about a week ago in which he famously called Trump supporters “semi-Fascists” – but that was at a Democratic fundraiser. Fundraisers are much more limited preaching-to-the-choir events, and often feature more incendiary language than speeches for a general audience.
You may recall slightly similar comments in speeches by Hillary Clinton, in which she called half of the voters on the right “deplorables,” or by Barack Obama, in which he referred to Republican voters in Pennsylvania or the Midwest as bitter clingers to guns, religion, and xenophobia. The thing is, both of these speeches were given at fundraisers; Obama’s in extremely blue San Francisco, and Hillary’s at an LGBT event in very blue New York City. They were also said during campaigns in which neither had been elected president, although Obama would go on to win his election and Clinton would go on to lose.
You can see a progression here, and I believe it is a planned one integral to the strategy of the modern Democratic Party. To the best of my knowledge, until Obama was campaigning for the presidency, although it was commonplace for politicians to attack rival politicians, I can’t recall any American president attacking the supporters of a rival politician. Maybe it occurred, but I certainly can’t think of it; Truman’s famously nasty 1948 campaign was directed against officeholders and not the public. And LBJ’s famously nasty ad depicting Goldwater as a person whose election would lead to a mushroom cloud was an attack on Goldwater, not his voters.
Obama broke that tradition, but only at a fundraiser and also, if you look at the actual text of what he said, it was more smugly condescending than nasty:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them…And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
It as shocking at the time, but now it seems relatively mild – Obama as therapist, psychoanalyzing the poor dears.
Hillary “deplorable” accusation was also made at a fundraiser, and a radical one at that, but she took it quite a few steps further than Obama along the path where we find ourselves today. She was no longer the least bit understanding or sympathetic to those she put down. But she did say it was only half of Trump’s supporters who were so awful:
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
Half are deplorable, some are irredeemable – but they “are not America.” She also added an interesting echo of Obama’s sympathy/empathy/therapist-talk for the other half of Trump’s supporters. In other words, the bitter clingers:
…but that “other” basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.
Trump himself could and still can be a very nasty guy, but to the best of my recollection I don’t think he ever attacked Democrats or Biden voters.
Here’s the full text of Biden’s speech from yesterday. It goes many many steps further, although he has a little bit of language in there that tries to limit what he’s saying. Here’s the attempt at limitation:
Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.
Now, I want to be very clear — (applause) — very clear up front: Not every Republican, not even the majority of Republicans, are MAGA Republicans. Not every Republican embraces their extreme ideology.
But “MAGA” was merely Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again. Trump supporters bought hats and T-shirts and posters that said MAGA, and I would go out on a limb and say that just about everyone who voted for Trump really did want to make American great again. The great majority of Republicans voted for Trump in both elections, and support most of what he did. So Biden is quite obviously referring to all of them.
The next line makes it even more clear:
I know because I’ve been able to work with these mainstream Republicans.
The only Republicans Biden’s been able to work with as president are people like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger. Their numbers are very very few, and nowhere near a majority of Republicans in Congress or anywhere except the staff of the Bulwark (who arguably are no longer Republicans). Note also the subtle switch in Biden’s rhetoric from talking about extremist Trump voters to a very tiny number of “mainstream” Republicans he has successfully worked with, who certainly are not voters and certainly cannot be described as in the mainstream of the GOP, although he tries to label them that way.
Next:
But there is no question 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.
So he immediately returns, after the short feint, to the denunciation of Republicans in general, and the labeling of them as a threat.
More:
MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people.
They refuse to accept the results of a free election. And they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.
That particular statement of Biden’s hasn’t been given much attention, but I think it is crucial. It sets the groundwork for a coming Democrat attack on the legitimacy of any “MAGA Republicans” who might get elected. After the 2022 election, Biden (or a replacement such as Harris) will still hold the presidency, and the FBI and the DOJ will of course remain in overwhelmingly Democrat hands. This passage is a preemptive strike at any winners of the next election as people who have fixed that election illegally, while simultaneously attacking the same people as “election deniers” of the 2020 election, which was a “free” election.
This is one of the more subtly pernicious passages in a wholly pernicious speech.
It’s stunning in its Orwellian reversals, and of course he uses the popular term “election deniers” – a phrase I discussed in this previous post.
Biden continues:
MAGA forces are determined to take this country backwards — 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.
Remember when nice-guy Romney was asked during a 2012 campaign debate about states banning contraception? Romney was taken aback and didn’t understand where the question was coming from, but it was coming from the need to spread the false idea that Republicans might actually do such a thing:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?
MITT ROMNEY: George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. States have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so, and if I were a governor of a state or…
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, the Supreme Court has ruled —
ROMNEY: … or a — or a legislature of a state — I would totally and completely oppose any effort to ban contraception. So you’re asking — given the fact that there’s no state that wants to do so, and I don’t know of any candidate that wants to do so, you’re asking could it constitutionally be done? We can ask our constitutionalist here…
STEPHANOPOULOS: … asking you, do you believe that states have that right or not?
ROMNEY: George, I — I don’t know whether a state has a right to ban contraception. No state wants to. I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do that no — no state wants to do and asking me whether they could do it or not is kind of a silly thing, I think.
That was twelve years ago. Now it’s morphed into Biden declaring this is what Trump supporters are determined to do and plan to do. But then again, Biden’s the same guy who said in that same year of 2012, to an audience composed of many black people, that Romney wanted to “put you all back in chains.” Romney, one of the few people he might today describe as a “mainstream Republican.” (Note also when you look at this how much sharper Biden was mentally back then.)
But back to last night’s speech:
[MAGA Repulbicans] look at the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6th — brutally attacking law enforcement — not as insurrectionists who placed a dagger to the throat of our democracy, but they look at them as patriots.
It goes on, but I’ll stop with the close textual analysis because it’s both unnecessary and sickening. The demonization and Orwellian accusations and transparently hypocritical yet sanctimonious calls for unity continue for the rest of the speech.
I’ve seen many people label it one of the most divisive speeches ever given by an American president. But they never name a similarly divisive or a more divisive one. Personally, although I’m certainly not familiar with every speech given by every president, I can’t think of an equally divisive one. I can’t think of any speech by a president that targeted the half of the country who voted for a presidential rival.
In addition, this speech had no other purpose and no other theme. We’re not talking about a sentence or a paragraph embedded in a larger message – this was the subject matter of the speech, and there was no larger message except “everyone who hates these people should unite behind me” – which is essentially the same message, just the supposedly more “positive” part of it.
People keep saying that Biden has crossed the Rubicon. But this isn’t the first time he’s crossed it; it appears to be a meandering river that he crosses over and over. But actually, I think the Democrats crossed the Rubicon a long time ago, and I certainly don’t think this is just Joe Biden speaking and planning and plotting all by himself. I’ve said before that although Joe is far more cognitively challenged than he was even just a few years ago, I don’t agree with those who call him senile or who say he’s totally controlled by others and doesn’t even understand what he’s doing. My position on Biden is that he’s fully onboard although he gets befuddled at times, but that the Democrat Party is wholly given over to the same approach. I would be exceedingly surprised if anyone on that side offers any serious dissent to what he said last night. They may not think he should have said it out loud, but they will not denounce it as it should be denounced.
And therein lies the tragic and awful situation in which we find ourselves.
