Following up on my post below I wanted to highlight Brian Beutler’s newsletter today about Biden’s speech, with which I agree wholeheartedly:
The remarks don’t just live on the page and in the moment they’re spoken. They have the potential to be recirculated endlessly, on television and social media, and now these clips will communicate Biden’s meaning explicitly, without requiring any sort of decoding.
And as they circulate, they may also serve as an antidote to the huge glut of viral video content on social media that’s selectively edited to make Biden seem doddering and confused.
Making things like January 6—Trump’s totalitarian ambitions, his crimes and corruption, his general untrustworthiness—the central themes of the campaign has these ancillary benefits, because they are visceral. They unite Democrats, and enliven Biden himself. Policy and economics aren’t similarly unifying or morally black and white, and stripped of the emotional valence of insurrection and dictatorship, they evoke a softer register. They make Biden seem quiet and tired.
I want Democrats to consider the speech in this light because they have a fatalist tendency to throw a single haymaker, find it did not level their opponent for all time, and thus retreat to safe ground. In this period of after-action assessment, influential party figures will cite the worst news coverage and bad advice from inside the Beltway bubble as evidence that principled anti-Trump politics are a bust. That shouldn’t be the only view Biden hears.
Let the word go forth …