PrintMarch 18, 2024
All over but the shouting?
Like some of you, I was a bit surprised to hear a president shout at the State of the Union address.
We want an upbeat man with a little passion.
What we got was a man bent on reminding his base that he was fit to twist and shout on Saturday night.
So the bad news is that he shouted and the good news is that he got no bounce, as they say in politics these days.
This is from Ed Kilgore:
The State of the Union address, despite Biden’s combo platter of self-promotion and attacks on “my predecessor,” also had no palpable impact on general-election polling. In head-to-head matchups with Trump, the RCP averages showed Trump leading Biden by 1.8 percent on March 7 and by 2.4 percent today.Specific pollsters found no national pro-Biden bounce: Economist/YouGov had identical Biden/Trump numbers (a two-point Trump lead) as of March 5 and March 12. The Morning Consult tracking poll showed Biden leading by a point on March 3 and trailing by a point on March 10. Publicly available polling of a five-way contest that includes Robert F. Kennedy, Cornel West, and Jill Stein is more sporadic, but the two pos–-State of the Union surveys have given Trump a six-point (Forbes/Harris X) and a two-point (USA Today/Suffolk) lead.
So there you have it. Biden shouted and no one but the super partisans listened.
What I remember was watching the speech and concluding that the Democrats were desperate. It started with the topics. It sounded more like a campaign speech in October than what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they put that clause in the Constitution. Vice President Kamala Harris looked like a woman who was told to clap every 20 seconds. The "girls in white" celebrated on cue. It was all staged to get concerned Democrats out of their funk over the president's public appearances.
So here we are. No bounce and no one will remember a speech that contributed little to the state of the nation.
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Image: Screen shot from CNN video, via YouTube
