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Hi everyone,

It’s Leah, here to talk about what’s on our minds for our monthly
newsletter! As a reminder, Ezra and I take turns on these monthly
newsletters to give our thoughts (and take in yours) on the big political
issues of the day, and we also share a cute pic of Zeke at the end. No
fundraising here, just thinking and community building. Feel free to reach
out to me directly on [ [link removed] ]Twitter or on my [ [link removed] ]TikTok account. I am also
exploring less evil platforms like Post and Mastodon, and welcome
recommendations! 

Today, I’m thinking about the State of the Union (SOTU) and the Republican
response. And I want to talk about it here, because I think together they
offer a pretty good roadmap into some of the dynamics we’re going to
collectively face over the next two years.   

[ [link removed] ]A tweet from Indivisible NY19: BIDEN & DEMS: Growing our economy,
funding infrastructure, creating good jobs for ALL, building hope &
possibility! SANDERS & GOP: BE AFRAID, MURDER & DEATH ACROSS AMERICA, EVIL
DEMS MUTILATE KIDS, BORDER APOCALYPSE, CITIES ON FIRE, STOVE SEIZURES!
#AmericaWinsWithBiden #NY19

The President’s SOTU was actually really, really good

First, an important caveat: the SOTU is both an important and odd
political tradition. It’s important because it’s where the President uses
the bully pulpit to lay out his story of what’s happening in the country
and his agenda for the coming year. And it’s odd because the SOTU itself
is inevitably a long (and boring) laundry list, punctuated by the
occasional effort at profundity. It’s not anyone’s fault -- there’s just a
lot to cover!

A ground-breaking achievement: an actually good SOTU. All that makes what
happened on Wednesday genuinely impressive: President Biden delivered a
really, really good speech. He was compelling. He was emotional. He was
combative in all the right ways. And perhaps most stunningly, he appeared
to be having fun.

President Biden’s SOTU laid out a powerful -- and energizing -- populist
playbook. Green jobs. Taking on corporate power and monopolies, and the
ways they screw over regular people. Labor rights. Child care, eldercare,
and lower prescription drug prices. This was a forthright case for a
popular and populist Democratic economic agenda - one that sides with
working families over corporate power.

He defined the opposition -- and the threat they pose to our rights,
freedom, and way of life. Creating striking, memorable visual moments
where the other party refuses to stand for something that’s broadly
popular is extremely hard to do in the format of a SOTU, but as you can
see from our thread, Biden nailed it:  

[ [link removed] ]A tweet reading: Here are some things that Kevin McCarthy and MAGA
Republicans won't stand for (literally), which begins a linked thread of
tweets

But he also achieved something bigger. While President Biden may have
celebrated the idea of bipartisanship more than we would, he did a
masterful job of revealing the true state of the GOP. He defined the
coming fights over the debt ceiling and the budget, making clear that his
administration won’t negotiate with terrorists and forcing Republicans
into a series of news cycles about the threat they pose to Social Security
and Medicare. And he called out the extremist abortion bans moving forward
in red states, and opened and closed by naming the threat posed by
election deniers and the criminal conspiracists of January 6th.

His composure and good-natured responses in the face of unprecedented
Republican heckling lured the GOP into a trap -- tricking them into
revealing their extremism and hostility. And if you were watching Kevin
McCarthy’s face closely throughout the speech, you could see him cringe as
he recognized it and tried to get his caucus to shut up. 

OK, so I’ve made my point. The SOTU was really good. Why does it matter?
It matters because President Biden just laid out a playbook for a unified,
winning Democratic party: fight hard for our values, our agenda, and our
democracy. Define our opponents. Don’t run from conflict -- win it. It’s a
frame that takes the right lesson from 2022. When we make the fight about
MAGA extremism, and when we present a real, meaningful contrast rooted in
solutions for regular people, we win.  

Our job is to back up this playbook. Biden is outlining a plan on the
fights to come that may face opposition from within the Democratic party.
We should never underestimate the instincts of certain Democrats to fold
in the face of Republican intransigence, to try to negotiate on stuff like
the debt ceiling. That’s gotta be a hard no from us, their constituents.
The path to win is clear -- we just need to make sure our whole party
follows it.

For more on how we do that, I have a question for you. I am going to ask
for one little favor. I want to make sure we’re in sync with the
Indivisible movement on this, so I could use your help providing some
feedback. Ezra is still going through one by one the 1,500 responses he
got to his last newsletter. And so this time, I want to gauge your
thoughts on Biden’s speech. You are welcome to send in more feedback if
you’d like -- when you click any option it’ll take you to a form (and I’ll
personally read all the replies!). But even just giving me a quick click
will give us a thermometer gauge of how Indivisibles are feeling about the
SOTU (and of course additional feedback is welcomed/encouraged!)

On a scale of 1 to 5, how did you rate Biden’s State of the Union?

[ [link removed] ]⭐

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[ [link removed] ]⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Meanwhile, the Republican response was a nasty weirdo trash fire

If you bothered to stay up, you saw something very different in the GOP
SOTU response. The response was delivered by Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
previously best known for being the biggest lying liar Press Secretary of
all time and now governor of Arkansas. And it was bad.

Now, there’s a long history of people delivering SOTU responses and
absolutely wiping out. From Marco Rubio’s infamous swig of water to Bobby
Jindal’s confusing attempt to make jokes about volcanoes, lots of people
have failed at this task. It’s hard! The President gets to look all
authoritative addressing Congress. If you’re delivering the response,
you’re not going to be able to match those optics. 

But the problem here wasn’t the vibes. The problem was the content. The
whole speech was pretty much a rant about the “woke left mob.” I honestly
can’t successfully capture this without using her own words:

“Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute
their flags, and worship their false idols … all while big government
colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is --
your freedom of speech. That’s not normal. It’s crazy, and it’s wrong.” 

Live footage of the average voter reacting to this:

[10]Ryan Reynolds Looking Confused

In addition to being bad, this speech was extremely weird -- and that’s
because we’re not the target audience. When you’re given precious national
airtime to address the American public, it’s customary to talk about the
things they care about. And a lot of Sanders’ speech was simply incoherent
to anyone who hasn’t undergone right-wing brain poisoning. It was a
classic conservative effort to substitute grievance politics for an
actually appealing agenda. The reason it was so weird compared to Biden’s
is simple: Biden was speaking to Americans. Sanders was speaking to the
right-wing, MAGA wackadoodles who live in the Fox News Universe. For those
of us -- which is to say the vast majority of Americans - who don’t live
in that universe, the speech just didn’t make much sense.  

There’s a vicious reality behind these words. Sanders’ speech reflects an
ongoing crusade against our rights and freedoms that’s showing up in
terrifying ways in red states. The attack on “wokeness” has been the cover
for Republican efforts to ban books about civil rights and the Holocaust,
and to take aim at AP African American Studies. The hysterical rhetoric
about gender has fueled a series of bans that basically take aim at the
right of trans kids -- and increasingly, adults -- to exist. I’m writing
to you from Texas, where families are literally [ [link removed] ]fleeing the state to
avoid being investigated by child protection -- just for supporting their
trans kids. This kind of rhetoric comes with chilling real-world
consequences.

It’s also a preview of what’s coming. There’s a reason Sanders did this --
she’s trying to court the base and position herself as a national figure.
And she’s in good company. Donald Trump has made really clear that he’s
going to run on a remix of his classic grievance politics. Meanwhile Ron
DeSantis is waging an all-out war to remake Florida’s public education
system in the image of his extremist ideology. You can see the
jaw-dropping result [ [link removed] ]here:

[ [link removed] ]A tweet from News4Jax showing empty bookshelves in a classroom
This tweet shows an actual middle school library in Jacksonville,
illustrating the predictable results of Desantis’ attack on schools.
Florida teachers are being [ [link removed] ]threatened with felony charges for
displaying books that don’t pass the MAGA test. The Fox News Universe is
infecting the real world.

We shouldn’t shy away from these fights. We can win them. We’ve have the
winning argument: MAGA extremism is out of control. And the results of
2022 shows that when we win that overall narrative fight, the GOP culture
war attacks fail or even backfire. From [ [link removed] ]Third Way to [ [link removed] ]NEA, there’s
broad agreement that the attacks on trans kids and public education
flopped in the midterms. People like teachers. They don’t like it when
teachers are harassed or stalked. People like public schools. They don’t
like it when books are banned. And they really, really don’t like it when
they realize that all these culture war attacks are not only a sop to the
right but a cover for the GOP’s regressive agenda of tax cuts for the rich
and cuts to public services for everyone else. We can win -- but only if
we lean in and define what’s happening.

We know what’s coming, so let’s get ready.

OK, I’ve gone for a long time, so I’m gonna wrap it up. Let’s recap: 

Democrats have a winning play: a popular, populist economic agenda, a
fierce defense of our rights and our democracy, and a commitment to
defining the MAGA opposition. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are going down a rabbit hole on culture war
extremism. And we shouldn’t hide from that -- we should weaponize it
against them, as we did in 2022. 

In solidarity,
Leah Greenberg
Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director, Indivisible

Important PS! Next month, Ezra, Zeke and I will be welcoming our newest
IndivisiBaby, a baby girl! We’re all very excited (well Zeke is mostly
confused. But Ezra and I are excited). I'll be out for a bit to focus on
baby snuggles (we’re planning to stagger our time off, so I’ll be back in
the summer and Ezra will take some leave then).

Stay tuned for more baby pics, but until then, here's Zeke and Ezra
enjoying some time in the park:

[17]Zeke and Ezra on the swings at a park

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