Biden Strikes Back
What's next for the MAGA MCU? (Bonus Edition)
NOTE: I’m delaying my planned Part 3 of this series about MAGA World to look at President Biden’s speech from last night and examine what it owes to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address..
In this series, I’ve been covering the MAGA who’s who, but last night, Joe Biden got right to the heart of the MAGA what’s what, putting the entire enterprise into a starkly framed context as a battle for the soul of the nation.
“MAGA Republicans do not respect the Constitution. They do not believe in the rule of law. They do not recognize the will of the people. They refuse to accept the results of a free election, and they’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state, to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.”
That the speech was effective is obvious from the GOP reaction. They’ve been squealing like stuck pigs since he delivered it.
One of the secrets of its effectiveness (besides its truth) is how closely it followed the template of the greatest speech in United States history, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Before getting into an analysis of the speech, a couple of notes about the optics and the reactions.
First, the importance that the White House placed on last night’s speech is underscored by their decision to schedule it it as a prime-time presidential address. There was a period not long ago when an 8:00 PM speech would be inescapable— as all the major broadcast networks would pre-empt their schedules to carry it. Last night, however, none of them did. (Some local affilates did.). Even on cable, only two of the three dominant news networks carried the speech live. (You can guess which two.)
On the other hand, we’re in the internet age now. Networks have smaller audiences. The Biden speech was was widely streamed live (and it remains available for viewing on-demand.) I haven’t seen any estimate of how many people watched it.
Second, positioning and staging it as a presidential address at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia conveyed that this was meant as something more than a campaign speech.
Here’s how you know it wasn’t a campaign speech: those always have a string of local warmup acts and they begin with a tedious two minutes of thank yous to acknowledge every potentially useful ally in the audience. Last night’s speech, began in silence. No warmup. The doors opened and the President and First Lady entered to “Ruffles and Flourishes” and “Hail to the Chief,” played by the United States Marine Band. (The Marine Band is the official house band for the president. Founded in 1798, it’s the oldest continuously active professional musical organization in the United States.)
Third, despite its official billing and staging as a presidential address, the speech was promptly diminished as “political” both by Republicans (probably by many Democrats as well) and also by the professional commentariat . Matt Lewis, for example, in The Daily Beast derided the speech as a “campaign ad” because a couple of paragraphs included a list of some of Biden’s achievements.
I watched the speech on a page of The New York Times website where their political reporters offered live kibitzing. Of course, they horse-raced it, speculating on its political impact. One comment from Michael D. Shear struck me as especially dense:
This is almost two speeches — the grim, dark one in which Biden describes a democracy on the brink; and the optimistic one where drugs are affordable, climate change is being confronted and the economy is growing. It’s a challenge for any president to merge those two ideas. Not sure how people will react to this.
Shear must be unfamiliar with how speeches work.
The arc he describes—from grim, dark to optimistic—is a standard template. I’ve written executive speeches—for business executives, not politicians. And that’s one of the best formulas to follow. Think about sermons: the preacher threatens the congregation with hellfire and then offers salvation.
A lot of advertising works the same way: your life is a hot mess, but if you buy our product everything will be hunky-dory. Anyone remember the Steve Jobs keynote formula? “Here’s what sucks about X… Here’s how Apple fixed it. You can order it beginning this Friday.”
The bulk of well-crafted political speeches follow the dark-to-light trajectory. (One exception: the speeches devised by Stephen Miller for Donald Trump. Those usually start in deep twilight started and then descend into Stygian inky darkness.)
It’s a tribute to the vacuousness of much of our punditry that so little commentary was devoted to the substance of the speech and so much to arguing about whether it was a breath mint or a candy mint. (It’s a display of my own vacuousness that I’m offering meta-commentary on vacuous punditry.)
So, let’s look at the substance. If you follow it, the speech lives up to its advanced billing. It was tightly constructed around its key theme:
Democracy in America is under existential threat by MAGA Republicans and it is up to all of us to save it.
When one party has been captured by forces hell-bent on acknowledging only elections that they happen to win, then defending democracy can’t help but appear partisan. Despite that, Biden was clear in distinguishing between MAGA Republicans and the party as a whole.
Republicans heard a divisive speech. But Biden delivered a message of unity:
“That’s why tonight I’m asking our nation to come together, unite behind the single purpose of defending our democracy regardless of your ideology. (Applause.)…
Democrats, independents, mainstream Republicans: We must be stronger, more determined, and more committed to saving American democracy than MAGA Republicans are to — to destroying American democracy. (my boldface)
If no Republican heard that or acknowledged it, then, perhaps, they are all MAGA.
Clearly, some people get it.
The Gettysburg Formula
Here’s what impressed me about Biden‘s speech: it didn’t seem calculated. It seemed to come from his heart, expressing his passion for democracy, his love for this country, and his frustration with the extremists who have captured the Republican party. And yet, though it felt authentic, it was meticulously crafted, closely following the template of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
For sure, Lincoln’s rhetoric was far more poetic and memorable than Biden’s. But the structures of both speeches are surprisingly close.
Let me unpack some of the parallels.
1. Revisit the founding.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation,
Biden literally went to the city, to the very building of the founding and evoked it at the start of the speech.
“This is where America made its Declaration of Independence to the world more than two centuries ago”
2. Quote the founding documents
conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“with an idea, unique among nations, that in America, we’re all created equal.”
(Note how he skirted the gendered expression of the original.) Biden took it farther than Lincoln, quoting not only the Declaration but also the Constitution.
“This is where we set in motion the most extraordinary experiment of self-government the world has ever known with three simple words: ‘We, the People.’”
3. State the existential threat
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.
“But as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.”
Biden, whose speech was more than ten times longer than Lincoln’s expanded on that theme with a long and damning bill of particulars. He also named names:
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
4. Evoke the sacrifice
We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
“We saw law enforcement brutally attacked on January the 6th. We’ve seen election officials, poll workers — many of them volunteers of both parties — subjected to intimidation and death threats. And — can you believe it? — FBI agents just doing their job as directed, facing threats to their own lives from their own fellow citizens.”
5. Honor the fallen
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
There is, of course, no parallel to this passage in Biden’s speech in Philadelphia. Lincoln, after all, was dedicating a cemetery after a blood-drenched battle. But Biden, during the 2020 campaign, visited Gettysburg to honor, the fallen that Lincoln praised as “the brave men, living and dead… [and] … what they did here” Biden in 2020 said:
“There’s no more fitting place than here today in Gettysburg, to talk about the cost of division. About how much it has cost America in the past, about how much it is costing us now, and about why I believe in this moment, we must come together as a nation.”
Brief aside: Biden’s 2020 Gettysburg speech is one of the seminal speeches of his campaign, worth revisiting to know the measure of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.
6. Define the task ahead
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion —
“Our task is to make our nation free and fair, just and strong, noble and whole.
”And this work is the work of democracy — the work of this generation. It is the work of our time, for all time.”
7. Eyes on the prize
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
And if we all do our duty — if we do our duty in 2022 and beyond, then ages still to come will say we — all of us here — we kept the faith. We preserved democracy. (Applause.) We heeded our wor- — we — we heeded not our worst instincts but our better angels. And we proved that, for all its imperfections, America is still the beacon to the world, an ideal to be realized, a promise to be kept.
It’s to be expected that Republicans would work to diminish and undermine Biden’s speech at Independence Hall. It’s disheartening that so many pundits felt obliged to do so as well.