Hey, kids, let’s take a quick tour of reactions to Old Handsome Joe’s big speech last night, shall we? We’ll start with the New York Times, which in the early hours had just four takeaways from the speech but expanded it later this morning to five (gift link). For once, the Grey Lady didn’t suggest that Biden had failed sadly against the younger, sleeker Donald Trump (ew), but the Times at least set aside its monocle to acknowledge that Biden did okay, at least considering how low the bar was, sigh.
Mr. Biden has rarely been called a bold orator. But he arrived on Capitol Hill on Thursday with the benefit of mercifully low expectations after unrelenting Republican attacks on his mental and physical fitness.
Oh, yes, and one cannot approve of those Republican rowdies, so that helped Biden a bit:
He opened with Donald Trump. He closed with Mr. Trump. And in between he taunted and teased the Republican lawmakers in the chamber who were protesting and jeering, readily taking the bait — and even one person’s pin — to score political points of his own.
For the Times, though, it was a pretty balanced assessment, giving credit to Biden for framing the speech to his advantage and contrasting his record with the 2017 to January 2021 Trumpster fire, and noting — approvingly, even! — that Biden devoted “far more time to abortion than the 72 words he spent on the subject in 2023.” As for Biden’s willingness to scrap with Republican hecklers, the piece noted that Biden gave as good as he got, and that it worked:
Mr. Biden and his advisers had prepared — in fact, had been eager for — an interplay with G.O.P. lawmakers. They are betting that people are looking for a fighter and someone who still has the energy to engage with his rivals, politically and on the global stage.
The Times even acknowledged that Biden avoided any gaffes that might “feed into concerns about his age, as expressed by broad majorities in both parties in multiple polls, he succeeded in that mission” — and that faint praise, mixed with the reminder that everyone’s worried he’ll keel over any moment — was about the most you could hope for, even if it didn’t “quell widespread voter concerns about his age or change G.O.P. strategy,” as if any speech would be capable of the latter.
That said, without any particular slip-up or “doddering” to focus on, wingnut media figures really did seem to struggle to find points to attack Biden’s speech. So they decided Biden was too loud, why is that old guy being so loud, huh? Here’s Frank Luntz, for once seemingly at a loss for words:
And here’s some heckler from the cheap seats:
On Fox, Kayleigh McEnany was doing punditry from the Upside-Down, fondly remembering the good old days when Trump surprised a military mom by bringing her husband back from the wars, just like on a game show, although he didn’t give them a BRAND NEW CAR.
McEnany: Who do you want to be president next time around, the angry divisive guy last night or the guy who tried to unify the country?
Fox Anchor Wossname: If Trump wins, wouldn’t that be great if he did that at every state of the union address?
That sounds like we’ll need to have some more wars for Trump to bring soldiers home from. Or maybe it’ll be a veteran of the Battle of Oakland or the Siege of Detroit, no telling.
And then there were all the idiots — including the Idiot King himself — who decided that since Joe wasn’t sleepy or out of it at all, he had to be ALL DRUGGED UP!
Sure there may not be such a thing as a drug that will temporarily change someone from being a senile zombie into a smartass with his Irish up. But it seemed plausible to people who think Italian satellites stole the 2020 election, and had the nice gaslighting side effect of distracting from the recent reminders that the Trump White House was like a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic but full of Nazis.
Still, there was some head-wagging about how political the State of the Union address had gotten, unlike four years ago when Donald Trump used the occasion to give Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and truly we are a fallen nation alas.
[NYT (gift link) / White House]
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