Late Night With Joe Biden
Noah Rothman joins me right now from National Review. You watched night one of the DNC. I also watched night one of the DNC. And neither one of us slept. The question before us is, is there anything from this first night of the Democratic convention, which featured Representative Ocasio Cortez, which featured former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which featured President Biden at 11:26 PM? Is there anything from today that gets remembered on Thursday when Kamala Harris speaks?
Wow, is that a good question. My instinct is no. And my, and when I think about it some more, I still think the answer is no. And that’s probably not all that atypical. Night one of any nominating convention is the traditionally something of a box checking exercise. It’s the business that you sort of have to get out of the way both, both in terms of just in an orchestration of the process, this is supposed to be an actual nominating convention, and there are processes that go along with it. It’s not just a pageant, even though that’s what it’s becoming within the modern age, but it’s also, you know, sort of sloughing stuff off to the past that you want to get rid of. That’s why Hillary Clinton was there. That’s why Joe Biden was in this featured program… The only exception to that rule I think is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. And that will be remembered not by Republicans and not by independents or voters at large, but I think it will be remembered by Democrats in a way because there’s a lot of motivated reasoning to it… They’re gonna make this into her version of Barack Obama’s 2004 convention address. And it departs from that only insofar as she expresses the zeitgeist of the modern Democratic Party. This is the zeitgeist of the modern Democratic Party: Total and complete victory. And this is just a broadly partisan sentiment. Republicans are not immune from it either, but they want to see victory and they want to see their adversaries suffer. And that was the tone of AOC’s address. And that’s the sort of thing that I think Democrats are going to really respond to. And to the extent that she was really a strong theatrical performer, I think you have to hand it to her, it was a strong performance.
I did give it its due you are you are 1000% correct when it has absolutely no connection to what Obama delivered in in ’04 at that convention that was that was noticeable and marked. This was a pure red meat speech from Representative Ocasio Cortez. But it was to appease that part of the base and certainly was meant to be the counter to having people like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. I considered Hillary Clinton speech to be quite literally the best speech she has ever given in her entire life. A nod to suburban women, trying to grab suburban women. I just don’t think it gets remembered.
After Thursday, but Joe Biden speech? Maybe it does. First things first, do we agree or disagree on the idea that 11:26 PM was purposeful? And then if you could follow it up, what was the purpose of a speech that was a rehash from things he said in 2022?
The thing that makes me question whether or not it was purposeful was the extent to which they scuttled they. They pushed off speakers. They told representatives Grace Meng and Debbie Wasserman Schultz to go pound sand. They scuttled some video packages. They really did try to speed up proceedings in the end, which makes me think that Occam’s razor applies here. And Occam’s razor is that this convention was just logistically tragic. They couldn’t get people in the in the venue for 2 to 3 hours going through security and even if close to prime time 7 to 8 o’clock. The venue was only partially full, and something makes me think that an organizational thing makes more sense than trying to deliver a very coded slight to Joe Biden. Planning would have had to be engaged in that, and there would be a paper trail associated with it. So, it leaves me to sort of take the poll, the conspiracy at arm’s length. Nevertheless, it did serve Democrats purposes to make sure that he didn’t get a primetime speaking slot. Not because Joe Biden delivered a disastrous speech. It wasn’t good. His performance was weird and screamy and and he and as you say. The substance of his speech was essentially a rehash of a bunch of the speeches that he had given over the course, with some updates over the course of his presidency, most notably, I think. That famously dark speech that he delivered on the soul of democracy in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia in September of 2022. All that, all that is true. But, think he did what he had to do only because Democrats were primed for him to do it.
You know, Louis CK has this great joke that I return to whenever I see Joe Biden speak. Which is the astronaut joke. It is it essentially, And I’m, I’m destroying it, but let me know the astronaut joke. But alright, so they’re gonna go watch it the minute you say this. So please get Louis CK correct. I’m killing it. But there’s so there’s an astronaut in space and he’ll say something like, Oh yeah, I can see my house from here. And it’s not funny, but everybody in the control room laughs. Hysterically laughs. Why? Not because he’s funny, but because he’s in mortal peril. The astronaut is in extreme danger, so even the attempt at levity is rewarded with all this undeserved enthusiasm. That’s what I how I feel whenever Joe Biden speaks, he is on a tightrope. And whenever he even attempts to do something that requires a little bit of effort and a little bit of risk, the audience just bends over backwards to reward it. And so that’s what I think the reaction is going to be to Joe Biden’s speech. It wasn’t good. His performance was awful, but he’s going to be feted for delivering one of the, you know, the greatest. Torch passing speeches of our era just because that’s what they need it to be.
Only because I’ve listened to Nancy Pelosi and it is very clear that the willingness and the desire to make Joe Biden disappear could lead itself to this kind of action. And we can agree to disagree on that one. I find I’m not a conspiratorial guy, but lately it’s just their kind of lay down the marker. The speech was indeed full of screaming, but it had its lines. Including a rehash of Charlottesville, which is of course false. Including this rehash of calling dead soldiers in Normandy losers and suckers, which there is no proven basis for. And then this line regarding the protesters, which he said before, I think he said it back in March or was it may that the protesters what I refer to as pro Hamas protesters, you could say pro-Palestinian protesters if you choose that, you know, “they have a point.” And his argument was that innocent people. Have died on both sides. I take this as a true kind of grotesque statement that it is to eliminate the reason for why the war began. Does this line haunt the Democratic Party at all, giving the Republicans and independents an opportunity to say this is ugly?
It so this is you’ve identified what I think is the big problem with this election is that there are a million vulnerabilities for Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, and you only need to pick one. I don’t think the Republican ticket can effectively litigate them, almost all of them. If you were to do what you just did in the voice of the president or former President Donald Trump or JD Vance, and you were to say, well, Joe Biden just essentially undermined his own case against the Charlottesville comments that she had made earlier, because now he says, well, these protesters, these violent unloving, menacing people who are ruining holiday parades and are attacking police officers and making life on campus miserable, he says, “they have a point.” What are they? Is the is the line from Republicans now that that’s as bad as Charlottesville or Charlottesville wasn’t bad and that is bad or are they going to try to relitigate? Charlottesville comments, as you just attempted to, which frankly are far muddier than the revisionist history allows them. No, they’re not. It would be politically foolish. I mean, it’s not above them to do things that are politically foolish, but that’s not a slam dunk case. It’d be far easier to make the case with any other Republican. Any other Republican could say the things you just said and maintain sufficient distance from the events of 2017 to be able to make a completely compelling case. But this ticket… COVID was a huge theme of night one of the Democratic Convention, and it was all revisionist history.
In fact, it was illustrative of how the fantasy world in which Democrats live in, in which they are supremely, managerially competent. And they got us out of the pandemic in ways that no other, no other politician did. It didn’t extend forever. They lamented the fact that. Children were having to take online classes in McDonald’s school, in McDonald’s parking lots, as though this wasn’t done to them. They even Raphael Warnock sort of articulated this weird sense sentiment in which COVID is sort of the the logic for socialism in this country because you had become your brother’s keeper. So it was not a time of communalism. It was a time of profound atomization. And loneliness and disaggregation, the mental health effects with which we are still contending, can any other Republican can make that case? Ron DeSantis can make that case. Brian Kemp can make that case. Half a dozen Republicans who are on the national stage can make that case. Donald Trump is not inclined to make that case. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to relitigate his record, even though it’s pretty admirable. He doesn’t want to talk about the vaccine. He doesn’t want to talk about the public health bureaucracy. He definitely doesn’t want to talk about how he lashed out at Brian Kemp and Ron DeSantis in particular for abandoning early on and more and to their credit, the restrictions that we engaged in. It’s just this particular ticket is ill equipped to navigate this political environment as a sort of thing that we knew going into it, but Republicans wanted a show. Now they got it.
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