More Reaction To Biden’s SOTU
Simon “Mr. Hopium” Rosenberg is usually upbeat about Democrats’ prospects, but after last night, he’s more upbeat than usual:
The core arguments Republicans make against Biden furthered evaporated last night. The economy is strong not weak. Inflation is down not rising. Crime and murder rates are plummeting not raging. All forms of domestic energy production are setting records and we are more energy independent today than in decades – there is no war on energy. Democrats are trying to bring order to the border, Republicans want to keep it chaotic. The “Biden crime family” narrative turns out to be a Russian operation laundered by traitorous Republicans. And now we saw a President strong, vigorous, powerful not old and frail. They have nothing. They have no argument. There is no reason to elect them. All that is left for them now is the madness of the orange man, more degraded, extreme and dangerous, a serial criminal and betrayer of the country, an historic embarrassment for America, and for the once proud party of Lincoln and Reagan.
Anand Giridharadas at The Ink sees signs that Democrats are beginning to get it when it comes to pitching their aspirations for the country. Drop the abstractions and get real:
He focused relentlessly on costs and quality of life. This is perhaps a hint of a bigger shift in the making for Democrats. You’re seeing a party that is realizing that people sometimes find big, sweeping policy ambition abstract-sounding and expensive-sounding, especially when they are stressed, even when those policies would drastically improve their lives. It’s just political reality. Smart Democrats are learning to move away from promoting policies in terms of giant new programs and instead to promote them as improvements to basic quality of life, reductions in cost, medicine for your stress. This is human-scale policy making, built on an anthropological understanding of the pain points in people’s lives, and framed through relieving those pain points rather than selling big programs.
More importantly, Biden positioned himself as a defender of freedom, using the word over a dozen times, sometimes in warning:
Many of you in this Chamber and my predecessor are promising to pass a national ban on reproductive freedom.
My God, what freedoms will you take away next?
“Saving Democracy So That We Can Do Cool Shit”
Republicans think of freedom in terms of “freedom from.” Democrats are reclaiming that universal value, and finally championing “freedom for.” Democracy can be an abstraction as well, if not tied into people’s everyday lives. Biden tied the two together, Giridharadas continues:
More than before, he answered the question of: saving democracy for WHAT?
Don’t get me wrong: saving democracy is important. Some of my best friends work to save democracy. But for some Americans, it can feel abstract and secondary to more pressing concerns. Last night, Biden broke the tradeoff between democracy-first and kitchen-table-first approaches. He integrated them into a story of Saving Democracy So That We Can Do Cool Shit — create things, build things, solve diseases, manufacture again, and so on. Democracy is an end in itself. It’s also a really great means.
A quarter of the way through the 21st century, Republicans’ idea of progress is anti-progress. They are determined to roll the clock back to the middle of the 20th. Giridharadas reminds Democrats of the importance of painting the beautiful tomorrow. Biden gets that.
The president wove a biography of the American soul. He identified three enduring American traits. One: the longing, the thirst, for liberation, to be free and ever freer. Two: the love of underdogs and comeback kids. Three: the hunger to build, to create, the move forward, to do stuff. He braided these deep American tendencies into a story of a country whose freedom is imperiled, but has shown that it can bounce back from darkness, reinvent itself, choose light, and now has a chance to save and more fully realize democracy, not just for its own sake, but to do stuff, create, invent, make.
MAGA Republicans are retromingents. I always liked that description.
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