The January 6 speech on January 5 went down as expected.  In other words, President Biden cannot run on his record, so he is going to tell us how bad former president Trump is going to be.

To be fair, he is not the first one to do something like that.  I recall President Carter saying that challenger Governor Reagan was going to privatize Social Security.  I’m sure you remember the time that a Paul Ryan lookalike threw his grandmother off a cliff.  Who can forget Senator Reid saying he knew that Mr. Romney had not paid is taxes?

So President Biden’s speechwriters know that there is not much to run on when inflation causes a restaurant owner to charge nearly $16 for sandwich.  There is nothing like an expensive sandwich to make you look back to the days when a BLT was a bit cheaper.

So I saw this story with an interesting headline: “Fired-up Biden shows gloves are off in January 6 anniversary speech.”

Here is a bit of the article:

This time it’s personal. On Friday Joe Biden tore into his predecessor Donald Trump as never before. He brimmed with anger, disdain and contempt. He apparently had to stop himself from swearing. So much for “when they go low, we go high” – and plenty of Democrats will be just fine with that.

If Biden was seeking to jolt his half-conscious 2024 re-election campaign into life, this may have done the trick. The palpable loathing of Trump took a good 10 or 20 years off him. Keep hating like this and he might do a Benjamin Button all the way to election day.

There is no better illustration of Biden’s evolution than a speech he delivered on the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection. On that occasion, he denounced a “web of lies” but never mentioned Trump by name, preferring to cite the “former president”. Those were still the days when he would talk about “the former guy” and get a laugh.

Two years on, in an address near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, Biden spoke the name “Trump” more than 40 times in less than an hour as he warned that his likely 2024 opponent would sacrifice American democracy to put himself in power. The 81-year-old president generally seems like a grandfatherly figure predisposed to give people the benefit of the doubt, which makes his detestation of Trump all the more striking.

Trump’s failure to act as a violent mob stormed the US Capitol, despite the pleas of staff and family members, was “among the worst derelictions of duty by a president in American history”, Biden said, noting that Trump went on to lose 60 court cases that took him back to the truth “that I had won the election and he was a loser”.

Well, you get the story.  Mr. Smith, the author, saw some life in Mr. Biden, but the rest of the country does not.  The polls are not moving.  In fact, they’re pretty bad.

Maybe President Biden should take off the gloves and give more January 6 speeches.  Or maybe Mr. Smith is having a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and can’t see that his guy can’t punch anymore.

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Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.