Biden's Philadelphia Speech

President Biden gave a good speech in Philadelphia at Independence Hall on Thursday night in talking about "the soul of our nation."  It was a good speech, but it was not a great one.  

The speech lacked the focus of earlier speeches on liberty and freedom, mainly because it was nearly half an hour long and speeches meant to call attention to democracy under threat are shorter and more to the point.  But then again, you shouldn't expect the Second Coming of the Gettysburg Address from Biden or anyone else.  

A lot of Biden's critics on his left will take issue with his assertion that violence and suppression are not who we are when there's plenty of evidence that such values are who we are and have been for a long time.  Slavery, the Civil War the Ku Klux Klan, lynching, Bull Connor . . . and back in the late 1960s, black activist Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, who was then known as H. Rap Brown, called for blacks to revolt against the government and declared violence to be "as American as cherry pie."  January 6, 2021 proved al-Amin right.  That al-Amin should have so much in common with the racist Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers is one of the great ironies of contemporary American history.

Biden was at his most effective in this psech, though, when he laid out a dark vision of America in 2022 and rested the blame at the feet of Donald J. Trump, whom he called out by name and declared an existential threat to the American Experiment.  He centered in on Trump supporters and their disregard for the will of the people and the rule of law.  Then President Biden strategically pivoted to the accomplishments of his own administration and the Democratic Congress and their relevance to making America freer and safer in order to set the argument as a choice between democracy and Trumpism, not as a referendum on the Democratic Party.  If there was one misstep Biden made in this speech and in remarks from earlier in the week, it was his somewhat clumsy effort to separate "mainstream" Republicans from Make America Great Again (MAGA) Republicans, because, quite finally, MAGA Republicans are mainstream.  Also, anti-Trump Republicans aren't really Republicans anymore.  They're either independents or members of the nascent Forward Party.

But with so many pro-Trump election deniers on the ballot in November in so many states for offices like governor or secretary of state, the choice in the 2022 midterms is clear - it's either the Democrats or the Trumpists.  The Forward Party (do you call its members Forwardists?) is still in the process of forming.