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- Elon Musk reacting to the news that an AI chatbot won’t use a racial slur. Cool guy!
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President Biden will deliver his first State of the Union address tonight after an, uh, eventful two years in the White House. Read this for a preview then follow along with our group chat during the speech!
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Statements and leaks from the president’s aides suggest that in tonight’s SOTU, Biden will lean as hard as ever into his America’s Grandpa energy, addressing the nation’s economic anxiety and worries about the state of global diplomacy by pulling us in for a (respectful, non-weird) hug and saying “Everything’s gonna be okay, papaw will fix it.” Unlike other SOTU addresses from his predecessors, the goal for Biden is not to use the speech to outline policy plans for the rest of the term (though he will ask for many things from Congress) but to remind Americans of what he’s already done.
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The Biden Administration has accomplished more in its first two years than most Americans expected (including most of us here at Crooked, we gotta be honest!), but he still remains on shaky political ground looking ahead to 2024. He’s had trouble cutting through the noise and making his successes known, despite delivering historically-low unemployment, rising wages, and the single most consequential piece of climate legislation in history. He continues to deliver on policy, but a large majority of Democratic voters say they’d prefer Democrats to nominate someone else for the presidency in 2024. (The whole Grandpa thing may have some downsides…)
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Elected Dems tend to be reluctant to celebrate legislative successes and improving conditions in America unless everything went off without a hitch and polling suggests the public is already grateful—a scenario that almost never materializes. So Biden absolutely should claim a bunch of victories and celebrate them. However, he’d probably have an easier time breaking through if he also couched his victory lap in language that casts Republicans as obstacles to further progress. Which, um, they are. I don’t care what DC consulting firms continually tell Democratic leadership, begging Republicans for “unity” as they try to tank the nation’s economy and throw larger percentages of the population into poverty for their own gain is not smart politics.
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Speaking of Republicans who want to blow up the economy…
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…Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy vowed to be “respectful” during the speech on the condition that Biden refrain from using the phrase “Extreme MAGA Republicans” as he has for the past few years. Biden should absolutely not acquiesce to any demand from Kevin McCarthy, but particularly not this one. Correctly identifying extremists as such is one of the most powerful rhetorical tools Democrats should regularly employ. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) will deliver the Republican response to Biden’s speech, and my hunch is she won’t be shy about depicting Democrats as “extremists” for things like wanting housing and health care that doesn’t bankrupt average Americans. (To be honest, Biden probably never intended to drop the Extreme MAGA Republicans line tonight, but now that McCarthy’s tried to box him out of it, shouldn’t he feel duty bound to let ‘er rip?! Yes, reader. Yes.)
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The White House reported yesterday that in tonight’s speech, President Biden will call for expanding a new cap on insulin prices to all Americans, after Republicans torpedoed a universal insulin price cap of $35 last year, and only allowed it to apply to Medicare beneficiaries. Biden has clocked a number of victories for seniors in his first two years, including landmark legislation allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices and cap certain out-of-pocket pharmacy costs, as well as his order for hearing aids to be sold over the counter without a prescription at greatly reduced cost. Again, he would do well to accurately identify that the sole obstacle to further health-care reform is Republican opposition.
President Biden has been in national office for half a century, and therefore carries many vestiges of bygone political eras, like the romanticization of “bipartisanship.” Joe, if you’re reading this (we know you definitely are): now is not the time. Close this email, make some hasty, last-minute edits to your speech, and don't put down your pen until it’s appropriately scathing.
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Survivors and the deceased continue to be pulled from the rubble two days after huge earthquakes ravaged southern Turkey and war-torn northern Syria. The death toll has now climbed to 7,800, and is expected to rise further as rescuers race against time in the freezing cold. The destruction caused by Monday’s earthquakes stretches hundreds of miles, and the aftershocks toppled thousands of buildings, heaping yet more tragedy on northern Syria, already in tatters after the country’s 12-year civil war. Authorities in Turkey have faced criticism from residents of the affected areas, who say that rescue efforts have lagged, while the response in Syria has been hampered by the obvious obstacles that come with the backdrop of civil war. Many believe that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not handled the crisis well, which could have serious implications for his re-election campaign, as Turks head to the polls in May.
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Decades of wrongheaded Republican economic policy culminated in the so-called “Fair Tax Act”—a proposal to eliminate all federal income tax and replace it with a whopping 30 percent national sales tax. It’s the Republican special on steroids: a tax code that would deliver huge benefits to the rich and be suffocating for everyone else. Even though it’s been temporarily and rightly dismissed as insane/extreme in Washington during the current debt-limit negotiations, we haven’t heard the last of this absurd proposal. In fact, the extreme legislation has the full support of all of the expected Republican contenders in 2024, including (are we shocked?) Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. This could be a considerable political gift for Democrats going into 2024 if they get the messaging right (which unfortunately is not a given, we’ve been burned before!).
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