It was inevitable that the corporate media would applaud President Biden’s State of the Union address if he had the vitality to stand upright for two hours and the vision to read a teleprompter. For ordinary voters who aren’t paid to praise him, Biden’s performance last Thursday night probably confirmed many of their fears about leaving him in office for another term. This, for example, is how he described the current state of our domestic politics: “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.” If your uncle said that during a family dinner everyone would agree that another trip to rehab was in order.
The Biden campaign is reduced to promoting a survey showing that only 31 percent of respondents have “a lot of confidence” in the President’s ability to carry out his official duties.
Biden’s speech was full of similarly crazy claims. Predictably, he brought up the fabled Jan. 6 riot and claimed, “Insurrectionists stormed this very Capitol and placed a dagger at the throat of American democracy.” Never mind that no one involved was ever charged with insurrection. Ignore the polls showing that most Americans saw the event simply as “a protest that went too far.” Biden insisted that democracy is in mortal danger and the locus of the threat is former President Trump, the Republican Party and the voters who support them: “My predecessor and some of you here seek to bury the truth of January 6th … This is a moment to speak the truth and bury the lies. ” All of this dreck was delivered in a weirdly angry and arrhythmical rhetorical cadence punctuated by “strategic shouting,” as Harold Meyerson generously describes it in the American Prospect:
He obviously had to deal with the age issue, in all its various facets. He dispelled, I think, the accusation of lack of energy, not least by virtually shouting at least half of his address. This was a departure from past State of the Union practice, but given his age, a necessary one … Yes, words were slurred and misspoken; that’s an artifact of age he clearly won’t dispel. Republicans will continue to highlight that, though if Biden takes to the stump with the energy and the messages he displayed Thursday night, those where-did-they-come-from nouns should matter less to at least a portion of the public.
If Meyerson actually harbored hopes that Biden’s SOTU speech portended an improvement in his stump performance, they were dashed the next day. Friday afternoon, as he walked toward Air Force One, Biden was accosted by reporters about his use during the SOTU of a verboten adjective to describe the murderer of Laken Riley: “Do you regret using the word ‘illegal’ to describe immigrants last night?” Biden responded with the following gibberish: “Well, I probably, uhhhh, I don’t re— it, uhhh, aghhh, technically not supposed to be here…” That answer should have been a warning to Biden’s staff to keep him away from the news media for the rest of the day. It was clearly a harbinger of worse things to come. (READ MORE from David Catron: Biden’s Cognitive Decline Continues Apace)
Sure enough, when Biden spoke at several Pennsylvania rallies meant to build on his SOTU “momentum,” he flubbed his lines horribly. In one speech he told confused Keystone State voters, “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you: send me to Congress!” A few minutes later he boasted, “We added more to the national debt than any president in his term in all of history!” At a different rally, he invited voters to conduct a thought experiment: “Imagine if tobacco had the same limitations companies that gun manufacturers!” Meanwhile, the polls began to trickle in on the SOTU address. Biden’s campaign has been touting CNN’s post-speech poll, but it paints an unflattering picture of public confidence in his mental acuity:
Following the speech, 31% of those who watched said they have a lot of confidence in Biden’s ability to carry out his duties as president, 28% that they have some confidence, and 41% that they have no real confidence. That’s a slight uptick from a survey conducted in the days before the speech, when 25% of those same people expressed a lot of confidence in his ability, 27% some confidence, and 48% none at all … The CNN poll was conducted by text message with 529 US adults who said they watched the State of the Union on Thursday, and are representative of the views of speech-watchers only.
Think about this for a moment. The Biden campaign is reduced to promoting a survey showing that only 31 percent of respondents have “a lot of confidence” in the President’s ability to carry out his official duties. Moreover, this was a poll of adults—not registered or likely voters. That almost certainly means actual voters are even less confident in Biden’s capacity to handle his job. Thus, his surrogates were out in force Sunday morning spinning the SOTU like crazy. One of the most absurd claims came from Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press: “As I sat the other night and listened to the president’s speech, I said to my colleagues, ‘I don’t know if that was Joe Biden or Joe Lewis!’” (READ MORE: Non-Citizens Have Been Voting Since 2008)
On CBS’s Face the Nation, Democrat Rep. Hakeem Jeffries was asked why the President is polling so poorly with black voters. He denied that it was a serious problem because they “understand that [Biden] has delivered over and over and over again.” The problem, of course, is what he has delivered — high prices, crime, the border crisis, ad infinitum. Black voters can also see what all voters see when he stumbles around and mumbles incoherently in response to questions. It’s obvious that the “state of the President” is bad and getting worse. If the Democrats and the corporate media continue to insult the intelligence of the voters about his condition, no amount of lawfare or ballot harvesting will save them.
