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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss their immediate reactions to Joe Biden's final State of the Union address of his first term. With plenty of energy and force, Biden delivered a strong message on a range of topics, but also dropped several verbal miscues to give us quite the roller coaster.
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It is the post-State of the Union reaction and analysis show.
I'm Jared Yates-Axton.
I am here with Nick Halsman.
Nick, I need to take care of this foam that's taking place.
Take care of the foam, please.
It's victory foam, I hope.
Something like that.
We just watched a very, very rousing State of the Union.
Let me tell you, there's a lot of corn on this cob that we need to get into.
Both the presentation, the incidents within, the actual proposals.
Where this thing won, where it faltered, where we're sort of in the middle.
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I promise you, you're going to get the best analysis possible.
Nick Halseman, this was... I don't want to be hyperbolic, This was a little bit of a make or break speech for Joe Biden.
I want to get into that in a second.
What needed to be done here?
We talked about it.
What actually happened here?
We're going to break it down section by section.
What are your immediate reactions to this speech?
Well, I would say it was a rollercoaster, a rollercoaster of emotions.
He had all manner of eliciting feelings that he wanted you to feel across the entire speech.
It didn't lag, really, maybe toward the very end, like 10 minutes before the end it started to, which is very natural for that long of a speech.
But I gotta tell you, like, you know, we were all watching for him as he's shuffling in to see just what kind of energy he was going to have and is he going to be able to, like, put to bed.
some of these, you know, the, the, the call for him being too old and his energy was fantastic.
I thought he was, um, energetic and forceful and, and was finally just sort of saying a lot of the things that a lot of people on that side of the aisle felt and would wish somebody would say out loud to people's faces.
And I thought it went as well as it possibly could have gone.
Yeah.
So first things first, roller coaster is a great way to describe this.
Uh, We will get into the particulars of this.
I've been watching... Man, I'm such a political dork, Nick.
I have been watching States of the Union since like 1985 or 6, when I should not have been watching them or understood what was going on.
These are usually really stale affairs, but in recent years they have turned into I don't know how else to describe them.
Barroom brawls, more or less.
And we'll get into the specifics of that.
It was a wild and entertaining State of the Union.
Biden obviously got coached up in terms of coming out hot.
Basically, the entire first half of the speech, he yelled it.
I mean, he literally just sort of yelled, and he took the Supreme Court to task without, and I will say, you know, listen, I am who I am, so every now and then I have to throw these things in.
He didn't call them out by their names.
He did not say the Supreme Court did this.
He talked about their decision.
You know, it is what it is.
What these speeches are for, Nick, one, this was for the base.
Biden's problem right now is making sure that Democratic voters will come out and vote for him again.
We just saw, I don't know if you saw this, but Minnesota also came out with about 20% uncommitted in the primary there, matching Michigan.
He has a problem in the northern Midwest, and it has a lot to do with Gaza, it has a lot to do with enthusiasm, a lot of frustrations.
This was to say to the base, watch this speech.
You're going to hear a lot of things that you want to hear.
I promise you I'm up to the task.
Here is my argument for my campaign.
By the way, thanks to the Biden administration speechwriter, loyal listeners who've been listening to the Muckraig podcast and obviously realized they needed to make a statement about what is your vision for the future?
Which we'll get to in a minute what all that was.
The second thing is, Nick, you have to give snippets to the people who aren't going to watch this.
The regular voters.
What is it that Biden said in this?
What are the highlights?
You know, something that somebody would see in the USA Today or the New York Times or whatever it is.
And he kind of nailed it on all fronts.
The delivery had problems.
We'll get into that in a second.
But this was a rousing State of the Union.
Joe Biden needed to come in and give this speech.
It had problems.
It has issues.
We'll get into those.
But overall, this was largely the speech that he needed to give with, I think, a few crucial mistakes.
And actually, quite frankly, I just want to go ahead and put this out here.
The President of the United States referred to human beings as illegals, which is disgusting.
And I think that's a real problem, and we'll get into that more.
But I think that this was a success for Biden.
Right.
I mean, in the context of him going way ahead of his skis to reform and make it more humane for people wanting to come to this country, You know, they're gonna have to do some cleanup where it's like it's a generational thing.
That's a term that they used for, you know, a long, long time ago.
Let me offer some free political advice.
If you are doing anything and Marjorie Taylor Greene is trolling you, do not engage with her.
Do not, as President of the United States of America, stand there at the State of the Union and get into a back and forth with an absolute psychotic member of Congress.
A troll.
Yeah, let's discuss that because she was wearing a thing that said Lake and Riley, and she's holding a pin, and she got the aisle seat right when he walked by in the beginning, trying to get his attention.
He kind of ignored her.
She's wearing a MAGA 2020 campaign hat, which Don't they have 2024 campaign hats by now?
Yeah, but it had Trump's signature on it.
I'm sure it had sentimental value to her.
You know, really classy, you know, wearing a baseball cap in the middle of that chamber.
So I actually liked that he sort of...
I mean, the delivery was terrible.
He uses the terrible phrase.
But I liked, you know, sometimes when you're like a comedian and you're getting heckled, there are ways to be able to deal with that, where you actually put the spotlight on someone who didn't really, really intend to have that.
And it usually shrinks them and makes it all sort of, takes away their power.
So I didn't have a problem with that, because he could acknowledge, like, they tried to pass a law that's purely political about making it, you know, strengthening laws against, you know, people who are in this country illegally who commit a crime.
Right.
That's what they're trying to do with that, with this bill that was named after Lincoln Riley.
So that's what the whole behind the scenes is.
So either way, I like that he tried to do that.
I like that he acknowledged what people were saying to him on the other side of the aisle and interrupting him.
I thought that was relatively effective overall.
Well, and I want to point out, and this is part of the larger thing that we have to discuss here. - Nick, people might remember when Obama was interrupted.
I forget the dude's name.
It was some South Carolina asshole who yelled, you lie.
And it was like the biggest thing in the world.
Like everybody in Congress was shocked by it.
Now we have the peanut gallery just basically losing their mind and going after the president in real time in a way that is not only disruptive.
I mean, we had a literal person disrupt this thing.
We had a person who had to be let out.
I'm going to put this out there.
Marjorie Taylor Greene now, in back-to-back States of the Union, has disrupted the proceedings.
She should be banned from the State of the Union.
That's it.
She should be banned.
I think by interacting with her, Nick, I agree you interact with the heckler at Chuckle's Comedy Club.
You're the President of the United States of America.
Some of the best moments in this, and he loves it, He loves going back and forth with the Republicans.
He's like, oh, you don't support that?
That's good to know.
And the other moment, Nick, I actually thought this was brilliant.
Him being like, I'll be darned.
That was actually kind of great, right?
But doing that back and forth with Marjorie Taylor Greene, first of all, it's only going to juice her fundraising.
It's only going to give her hits online.
She's going to be on Fox News for the next week talking about this shit.
On top of that, it degrades what you're doing and also encourages people in the future to do more of it.
And what happened?
This is the problem with Biden, by the way.
The moments where Biden's delivery of this thing got weird is when he got off rhythm.
Biden is a rhythm speaker.
And largely, and we've talked about this on prior episodes, because of his stutter, because of his speech impediment.
And when he starts to go a little bit off script, he loses it.
Because I can tell you this right now, this is a guy who practices his speech 8 to 15 times to get the rhythm down.
He gets the rhythm off.
And by the way, what he did, Nick, I don't know if you noticed this in the first half of the speech, he kept trying to hit the applause lines twice.
He'd be like, a better America!
Well, better America!
And he would get off rhythm.
And then what happened with Marjorie Taylor Greene, he got completely off rhythm.
He ends up basically using a version of a slur, which I'm sorry, we can't overlook that.
Like, I think, I think that was a, I think that was a bad choice.
I think it led to bad results.
I know that people online are enjoying it, but we also need to kind of take a look at it, right?
We need to understand that it wasn't necessary and it might've been an unforced error.
Fair enough.
I mean, listen, I don't think Fox News is going to take him to task for that.
I'm trying to actually think about what they're going to do to try and shade this.
And I think that the forceful delivery that he had at first, you know, for a lot of this is going to be, you know, couched as like he was yelling and the old man on the lawn, crazy screeching.
He'll probably try and do something like that.
But I had written that.
He definitely went off script in that immigration section.
And I was like, Like, this is not a good idea no matter what, because this is supposed to be a speech.
And by the way, I'm sure they write it that way in terms of avoiding phrases and letters together that would trip him up.
I'm sure there's a very, they know exactly what that is so they can avoid it.
And it's when he starts to do his own thing was when he, you know, he'll get out of that, what he's like the rhythm.
You know, it is, it's, he is a human and he does stumble.
I, again, I wish he wouldn't have used legal in that way.
But I do hear that the overall message across the immigration section was really, really positive, I thought.
And also put the Republicans in a weird spot where it was a bipartisan bill that was when he laid out exactly what it was going to do and how it was going to help.
It was going to make it better than it is now.
It will address a lot of the things these Republicans want, the red meat that they're looking for.
And he was able to call them out on it and for them not passing it.
And then they cut to Oh, my goodness.
The senator who sponsored it, who failed and ended up voting against a member.
Anyway, that guy.
Really sad shot of him sitting there so dejected.
So at any rate, you know, I think that, you know, there was some good stuff here.
Let's keep going on with the things.
I just want to say one thing.
Here is the thing, Nick.
I would be wrong if I didn't begin this opening reaction without mentioning this.
I said, who is this for?
This was for the base.
Now, when I say the base, traditionally we hear that, and it's like Democrats, people who would vote for Joe Biden, right?
The Democratic Party is splintered right now.
There is the traditional Democrats, right?
Your centrists, your liberals, neoliberals, all those people.
And then there is what we commonly and shorthandedly refer to as the left, right?
And I keep saying this all the time.
When we say the left, we're not actually talking about leftists.
We're talking about people who are more progressive or maybe even democratic socialists.
We're not talking about hard left stuff because those people were either undermined, depowered, and or murdered, right, in the last century.
The left Quote-unquote is not going to be happy with what they got in this speech.
They are going to hold on to the fact that he said, and illegal.
Also, by the way, his, and we'll talk about this later when we get to the section, his answer on Gaza, which took place 56 minutes into the State of the Union, one of the most pressing world issues that we have, was completely and utterly awful and toothless.
It sucked ass.
So nothing that happened here is going to move the needle in terms of like people who were saying they're not going to vote for Joe Biden because of ethnic cleansing.
What this did, Nick...
Was this changed the conversation with your Ezra Klein's?
It changed your conversations with all of the hand-wringing liberals who are like, should we have a brokered convention?
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