BIDEN STRIKES APPROPRIATE ADMONITIONS IN HIS SPEECH

This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

When a president gives a major speech, it’s normal practice for all sorts of individuals to parse what the president said.

Was the speech well-written?  Did the president strike the right chords?  Did the president utter lines that could resonate over time?  Did the president make any stumbles?

These questions surround what President Joe Biden told the nation a few days ago in a speech that was entitled, “The Soul of the Nation.”

My view is at least three-fold:

1. Biden did just what he had to do by calling out those – he called them “MAGA Republicans” – who don’t honor the country, who don’t respect the Constitution, and who, often by violent means, want to install THEIR leader, Donald Trump, even though he lost the last election.

• Biden made sure not to paint all Republicans with a broad brush.  He called out MAGA Republicans, not all Republicans.

• Biden asked all Americans to rally around retaining American democracy, not a perfect form government, but one better than all the rest.  [The last phrase in the sentence above is mine, not Biden’s.]

In The Atlantic on-line magazine, writer Tom Nichols said he felt Biden had no choice but to deliver his speech.  He called it a “sad duty,” suggesting that any president would have had to rise to the occasion, given what is at stake for the country.

Here is what Nichols wrote:

“…make no mistake:  He had to give it.  His duty demanded it.  As Biden rightly said, the American democracy faces an ‘ongoing attack’ from what he termed ‘MAGA Republicans’ who do not respect the Constitution, the rule of law, the will of the people, or the results of free elections.  No president could remain silent under such circumstances.”

Biden’s best line may have been this:

“Democracy cannot survive when one side believes there are only two outcomes to an election:  Either they win or they were cheated.  You can’t love your country only when you win.”

In the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson wrote this:

“President Biden’s bold rhetoric and stagecraft in his speech Thursday night were, if anything, understated.  We are in a fight to save our democratic system, and it would have been wrong to pretend the battle is not both political and partisan.

“’Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,’ Biden told the nation. There, he said it.  He named names.  One of our two major parties, in thrall to a would-be autocrat, is no longer committed to the American experiment — and thus can no longer be trusted with power.”

I agree with Robinson.