And then there was President Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address. This is the annual event in our politics that gets the most viewers. Last year, 38.2 million people watched it on television and streaming services. What viewers saw tonight was a president repeatedly offering to work across the aisle as he outlined a moderate plan for the nation with a wide range of popular programs. He sounded calm, reasonable, and upbeat, while Republicans refused to clap for his successes—800,000 new manufacturing jobs, 20,000 new infrastructure projects, lower drug prices—or his call to strengthen the middle class.
The photo of that one woman, her mouth stretched open in a howl of hate; it brought to mind the faces we saw so long ago gathered behind Black schoolchildren as they headed toward newly desegregated classrooms. It was shocking then, seeing those neatly dressed but anonymous hurling pure howling hatred to innocent kids. It’s different but no less shocking seeing that very expression from elected officials directed at our President of the United States. It’s insane. And it’s forever frozen in time, that moment of unhinged lunacy. Shame, shame, shame.
This speech was perfection. McCarthy tried to droop his eyes like he was bored, listening to "Sleepy Joe." But President Biden was anything but sleepy, and he knocked it out of the park. And apparently Social Security and Medicare are safe, too!
Dispatches from the land of the youth! I talked with my little brother recently about this "disconnect" our Professor adressed yesterday between accomplishment and awareness. For background, bro is 22 and voted in 2020&22. I would like to think he would have even if we didn't live together, but *when you live with me you ARE voting.** He thinks Biden is "such a creaky old grandpa, like the rest of them, at least Kamala gives us someone nice to look at on TV," (I reminded him our Dad is basically the same age) but voted for him and the Democrats both times because "I pretty much agree", and the Republicans "are like Christian terrorists who are giving us a bad moment."
He is also much more of a people person than me, to put it mildly, with a diverse group of friends. Talking to him it became clear that his friends are split in two groups that represent this age bracket: the ones who follow what is going on, and the ones who don't.
The ones who follow track with what you would expect based on the near-record youth midterm turnout and those snazzy Harvard surveys: they're increasingly impassioned and see political participation as necessary because we are in a war over basic values and whether they get a future. They liked Bernie (oy!) and are more likely to post political stuff on TikTok than talk about it in person (eh?).
The ones who don't follow see how stressful and scary everything is, but are overwhelmed by it and find the ins-and-outs of news/politics obscure and at a remove, so they just check out. This is little bro's camp, unfortunately. He's pretty tenderhearted, doesn't like the news, and can successfully go about his day without reading the news, therefore - despite being online all the damn time - apparently he... knows... nothing. So obviously he thinks I'm a wee bit of a shill for being so gung ho about the current administration, and thinks that not much at all has been accomplished. He got defensive and asked me to name one thing - just one really big thing, not a little thing like the tinkering with Medicare stuff that makes old people happy, because they are the ones that always get catered to - but one really actually big thing that has actually gotten done that should prove he should have hope that Biden & co. didn't just string us along. If a real change is happening, you shouldn't have to be a news junkie to notice, right? It should hit you where you live and get everyone talking, right? So just name one thing!
He said this like people do when they have the expectation you won't find the one thing.
So obviously I said the first and biggest major climate bill in human history. Mood in the room changed on a dime right there. Obviously that's impressive. Bro typed it in on his phone. Bro was impressed. More importantly, bro was relieved. He wanted to be wrong. SOMEthing CAN happen! A big thing! A thing they said they were going to do and actually did!
Bro had literally not heard about this thing for almost half a year.
Anyway, I started going on about CHIPS and the 11 million jobs and how guaranteed HE wouldn't have a job right now if it wasn't for the Rescue Plan, because do you really think a recent graduate - a MUSIC major - could pick up a job in two seconds flat - in EVENTS AND CATERING, no less - if we didn't have those damn shots getting to people so fast last spring, but I got tuned out for being "too intense" and listing more than the challenged one thing.
Write him off as intellectually lazy or willfully ignorant or unpatriotic or not community minded at your peril. This is a straight-A student who was an Emerald Star State Ambassador for 4H (look it up), a guy who did color guard in middle school, volunteered unprompted for Kids Against Hunger, and was known by name at the local veterans center.
This is not a Dem Comms problem. The other side has a vicious propaganda network assisted by a centrist mainstream media intent on elevating hot "perspectives" over unsexy substance. We have US. WE are the communications network. Voting and political participation are habits. Everyone begins a habit at a different time and with a different motivation. I undetstand the frustration with not-yet-voters or unreliable voters among WE, THE CURRENTLY INFORMED. If you have not noticed the stakes by now, how will you ever? But voting is a habit, and the final key push a person gets to start a healthy habit comes differently for everyone. A lot of people can feel the stakes, but don't know if participating is worth it, or always worth it, and you will not keep them with you at this stage with further yelling about apocalypse avoidance. You win them over by giving them what we all WANT to see: positive results.
For the next 21 months, I beg of you: make yourself a propaganda machine spreading positive accomplishments for our big- and small-D democrats. The people we need to stay in our camp at this inflection point for democracy did not watch tonight. The person they will listen to, if they know you, is you.
I said this earlier on TCinLA’s Substack but it’s what struck me during his speech. He hit it out of the park! I don’t think the Republicans even saw the ball flying until it was over the fence. Nice job Mr. President!
Biden’s address was as good as it gets. He was controlled yet forceful. He handled the heckling without letting it get in the way of his presentation. The GQP has nothing to fact-check when Biden touted his successes, which have been plenty. The economy speaks for itself but what he said about supporting people who do not have college degrees had to hit home for many people. America suffered greatly when we sent product plans overseas so the corporations could hire cheap labor, while they made millions. These CEOs knew that they would never get their items made by Americans for the wages they wanted to pay. We have a president who is passionate and compassionate about getting the engines restarted in our country and paying people decent wages. Level the playing field, that’s what we all want. Biden made Qevin look like the fool he is and boy, was that a pleasure to watch! Loved watching Mitt Romney give Santos hell!
Thank you Heather, for your incredible analysis and presentation of the most important points. Rousing oratory, I loved every moment. I did not listen to Hucksterbee. She is a windbag if ever there was one. I found Murderess Treasonous Gangrene really beyond the pale. Like a disgusting high school senior on a trip before graduation. (I shepherded many during my long career. And she would have been sent home for such vile behavior...) Unhinged she appeared. And, that white coat....! We are all waiting for Garland and Smith to kick in.
The president seemed to relish the back-and-forth with the hecklers. Not wanting to be snarky, but I did laugh with pleasure at his deft responses and the way the Medicare/Social Security exchange went. We’ll see how the next couple of years go…
"The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left,” she said. “The choice is between normal or crazy."
For once, a right-wing Republican speaks the truth.
Imagine if in schools, the bullies and the ill-behaved students were allowed to run rampant and treat their teachers in the same way as these so-called adults in Congress treat their President. Why isn't there a procedure to sanction outrageous behavior in the chambers?
His address was so much better than last year’s, uplifting even. I’m glad I watched. I loved his back and forth with the Republicans on Social Security and how they ended having to stand up and applaud for leaving it intact, even expanding it. 😂
The best retort of the night that I read was courtesy of a very nice and witty lady by the name of Lynn Geri over at the Steady Substack of Dan Rather. She wrote -
Lynn Geri
"It was a good speech delivered well, by a good man. I think he managed the right tone, played all the songs I care about. I didn't even mind the fish he threw to the seals who are learning to perform... didn't smell up the room too much. A fish now and then may train most of the animals." (lol ! )
I was so pleased with Biden this evening, he was brilliant! Thank you, Heather, for reporting on that important hour so eloquently. I could hardly bear to look at the sleepy, eye-rolling Speaker. Was he ashamed of his cohorts' behavior? I was. I am sure the world was watching and is ever-increasingly wondering "what has happened to America"?
I couldn't watch Sarah H-S either. Perhaps I should have but I knew her words would not be relevant, so why bother?
Well done, HCR! You managed to convey the substance and style of the speech, and the lack of substance and style by the MAGA maniacs. BTW, I include Sarah Huckabee Sanders in that group.
President Biden's performance this past evening was an absolute marvel to watch. His topics were predictable, and he stayed away from the divisiveness that gets younger and more hotheaded Democrats into trouble over social equity issues over their perceived rights to self actualization, at whatever the cost to everyone else.
That said, watching the president handle the Republican brat pack in the audience by getting them to deny what they have been surreptitiously advocating for all along was worth the price of admission. Those video clips are going to be part of the Democrats' central campaign strategy for the next 21 months. The president baited them, and the Republicans willingly fell into his trap. All the while, he maintained decorum and kept his Irish temper in check; but hitting the Republicans on an emotional level with his accusation that they were plotting to eviscerate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and then allowing the world to see their angry denials and insults when they knew his allegations were true, served to prove his larger point: these people have no business being in Congress where the affairs of state are handled. They're temperamentally unsuited to the job, and their ideology is anathema to what the majority of American voters deem to be necessary for a member of Congress to do their job effectively. Today's Republican Party cannot argue issues on their merits; instead, they continue to practice the politics of destruction and denigration.
In his own way, Joe Biden is better equipped to be President of the United States than any of his predecessors since Harry Truman in 1947. In the 1946 midterm elections, control of Congress went to the Republicans after the Democrats had controlled Congress for the previous 20 years. He was faced with having to negotiate with a hostile House of Representatives, many of whom wanted the Roosevelt New Deal to be eviscerated, and pretend that it never happened. President Truman was a fighter, and the three-term member of the Senate before he became Franklin Roosevelt's vice presidential running mate in 1944. He knew the Senate, and he knew how Congress worked; and building on that experience, and his prior experience as a County Judge in Kansas City, Missouri, before entering national politics, Truman who had a deal with people and get things done. During World War II, Truman headed up an influential Senate committee investigating graft, corruption, and inefficiency in the procurement of arms and matériel for the war effort. He became nationally known. He hadn't sought the vice presidential nomination, who most people thought would be going to Henry Wallace, the then-Vice President. But Franklin Roosevelt had other plans, and he let it be known to a select number of senators and members of Congress that he wanted Truman to be his running mate, but without making any sort of public announcement about it. (The reasons for that I'll address at another time; but the point is that Harry Truman gained President Roosevelt's confidence that he would be up to the task of becoming president if he, Roosevelt, became disabled or died.) There is little doubt that President Roosevelt, desperately ill at the time he was running for his fourth term in office, knew that he had little time left, and he wanted the government to be placed into the hands of someone whose judgment he trusted.
Joe Biden is a man very much like Harry Truman. They come from different eras, different social and economic backgrounds, but each had implicit faith in the American people and in American democracy. Like the president today, people greatly underestimated Harry Truman, who was constantly denigrated by other men who thought themselves better equipped to be president than he who actually got the job. At the time of his death in 1972, Harry Truman was one of the most respected men who had served in American government. Historians judged him at the time of his death as among the great or near-great presidents we have had. It was not his ability that was questioned when he entered the presidency; rather, the man whom he replaced was the only man in American history who was elected to the presidency in four consecutive elections, and the man who'd seen his country survive the deepest economic downturn of our history followed by our participation in a worldwide war in which America had played a principal role in bringing victory to the Allied side. Beside this rockstar, Harry Truman was a simple man, with simple tastes, who saw his duty, and worked his heart out to get the job done right. It was Harry Truman, Southern born and raised, who desegregated America's Armed Forces after World War II; and it was HarryTruman who was challenged over his commitment to civil rights for black Americans by the breakaway Dixicrat Party led by Strom Thurmond in the 1948 Presidential Election. Harry Truman won that election, to the professional pundits' great astonishment. After his presidency, Truman went back to his family home in Independence, Missouri, and lived the life of a retired public servant.
Joe Biden is very much in the same mold as Harry Truman. Before becoming vice president in 2008, Biden served as a senator from Delaware, first elected in 1972, at age 29, the year before he became constitutionally eligible to take his seat in the Senate. But, like Harry Truman, he came from working people. Truman had been a farmer before World War I, and artillery captain who'd gone overseas during the war, a businessman whose haberdashery business went bust in the recession that followed the end of World War I, returning to farming, until he went into local Kansas City politics as a county executive. Biden's boyhood was also working class, and his father struggle to make ends meet, finding it necessary to move from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Wilmington, Delaware, in pursuit of job opportunity. Being part of a working family that needed to relocate in order to find a job that would put food on the table is something that haunts people. It makes people feel insecure about their futures, much the same way that Harry Truman must have felt after his clothing business failed, and he had to return to farming in order to make ends meet. When Harry Truman met his future wife Bess, her mother heartily disapproved of the young man her daughter had chosen to marry, claiming that he would never amount to much. During their married life in Independence, Harry and Bess lived in her mother's house. When, as a United States Senator, Truman had to be in Washington, he lived in a rental apartment, modest by any standard. I don't recall ever reading that Truman ever went out and purchased property in his own name where he, his wife, and daughter, Margaret, would live. In other words, apart from his government jobs, Harry Truman lived much like everybody else who had to work for a living. Joe Biden has done better in his life financially than Harry Truman could ever have done, given the resources that were available to him at the time he was building his career as a local politician in Kansas City, and later as Senator. Truman was always a man of the people, even if his economic situation did improve somewhat during the years that he was a senator. Even then, Truman knew that if he lost a senatorial election, his economic prospects would be bleak. He would not be sitting on any corporate boards, he would not have a large portfolio of stocks and securities. He would've been poor.
Yesterday evening's speech showed us the kind of man Joe Biden is. At the core of his being, Biden is the kind of workingman his father was throughout his life. Owning a large house in Wilmington, and a vacation home in Rehoboth, doesn't tell us the kind of man he is. We see the kind of man Joe Biden is by what he cares about; and above all, consistently, and without deviation, this is a man who cares deeply about all of us, even those who didn't vote for him. The odd thing is, at 80 years of age, he is temperamentally the best kind of person to be president of the United States of America that anyone could hope to find anywhere in our 236 year history as a nation. I think he is a few months younger than I am, and yet I am astonished at his vigor, and his ability to stay in the moment. Whether or not he decides to run for a second term is yet to be seen; but he certainly sets an exceptionally high standard for anyone who wishes to be considered to be presidential material. Obviously, the former president was not presidential material and we will be paying the price for that for decades to come. It is long past time that the American people put their adult hats on and see who is actually able to do the job of being president. From what I have seen of the Republican Party, there is nobody who meets that standard. Both the Clintons and the Bushes, father and son, were deeply flawed individuals who set low standards for others to follow them into that office. The Obama presidency held great promise, but he was too inexperienced to really get the job done properly. And, for reasons I cannot fathom, Joe Biden became president at just the right time that the country needed a man just like him. Who would've thunk it!
The photo of that one woman, her mouth stretched open in a howl of hate; it brought to mind the faces we saw so long ago gathered behind Black schoolchildren as they headed toward newly desegregated classrooms. It was shocking then, seeing those neatly dressed but anonymous hurling pure howling hatred to innocent kids. It’s different but no less shocking seeing that very expression from elected officials directed at our President of the United States. It’s insane. And it’s forever frozen in time, that moment of unhinged lunacy. Shame, shame, shame.
This speech was perfection. McCarthy tried to droop his eyes like he was bored, listening to "Sleepy Joe." But President Biden was anything but sleepy, and he knocked it out of the park. And apparently Social Security and Medicare are safe, too!
Dispatches from the land of the youth! I talked with my little brother recently about this "disconnect" our Professor adressed yesterday between accomplishment and awareness. For background, bro is 22 and voted in 2020&22. I would like to think he would have even if we didn't live together, but *when you live with me you ARE voting.** He thinks Biden is "such a creaky old grandpa, like the rest of them, at least Kamala gives us someone nice to look at on TV," (I reminded him our Dad is basically the same age) but voted for him and the Democrats both times because "I pretty much agree", and the Republicans "are like Christian terrorists who are giving us a bad moment."
He is also much more of a people person than me, to put it mildly, with a diverse group of friends. Talking to him it became clear that his friends are split in two groups that represent this age bracket: the ones who follow what is going on, and the ones who don't.
The ones who follow track with what you would expect based on the near-record youth midterm turnout and those snazzy Harvard surveys: they're increasingly impassioned and see political participation as necessary because we are in a war over basic values and whether they get a future. They liked Bernie (oy!) and are more likely to post political stuff on TikTok than talk about it in person (eh?).
The ones who don't follow see how stressful and scary everything is, but are overwhelmed by it and find the ins-and-outs of news/politics obscure and at a remove, so they just check out. This is little bro's camp, unfortunately. He's pretty tenderhearted, doesn't like the news, and can successfully go about his day without reading the news, therefore - despite being online all the damn time - apparently he... knows... nothing. So obviously he thinks I'm a wee bit of a shill for being so gung ho about the current administration, and thinks that not much at all has been accomplished. He got defensive and asked me to name one thing - just one really big thing, not a little thing like the tinkering with Medicare stuff that makes old people happy, because they are the ones that always get catered to - but one really actually big thing that has actually gotten done that should prove he should have hope that Biden & co. didn't just string us along. If a real change is happening, you shouldn't have to be a news junkie to notice, right? It should hit you where you live and get everyone talking, right? So just name one thing!
He said this like people do when they have the expectation you won't find the one thing.
So obviously I said the first and biggest major climate bill in human history. Mood in the room changed on a dime right there. Obviously that's impressive. Bro typed it in on his phone. Bro was impressed. More importantly, bro was relieved. He wanted to be wrong. SOMEthing CAN happen! A big thing! A thing they said they were going to do and actually did!
Bro had literally not heard about this thing for almost half a year.
Anyway, I started going on about CHIPS and the 11 million jobs and how guaranteed HE wouldn't have a job right now if it wasn't for the Rescue Plan, because do you really think a recent graduate - a MUSIC major - could pick up a job in two seconds flat - in EVENTS AND CATERING, no less - if we didn't have those damn shots getting to people so fast last spring, but I got tuned out for being "too intense" and listing more than the challenged one thing.
Write him off as intellectually lazy or willfully ignorant or unpatriotic or not community minded at your peril. This is a straight-A student who was an Emerald Star State Ambassador for 4H (look it up), a guy who did color guard in middle school, volunteered unprompted for Kids Against Hunger, and was known by name at the local veterans center.
This is not a Dem Comms problem. The other side has a vicious propaganda network assisted by a centrist mainstream media intent on elevating hot "perspectives" over unsexy substance. We have US. WE are the communications network. Voting and political participation are habits. Everyone begins a habit at a different time and with a different motivation. I undetstand the frustration with not-yet-voters or unreliable voters among WE, THE CURRENTLY INFORMED. If you have not noticed the stakes by now, how will you ever? But voting is a habit, and the final key push a person gets to start a healthy habit comes differently for everyone. A lot of people can feel the stakes, but don't know if participating is worth it, or always worth it, and you will not keep them with you at this stage with further yelling about apocalypse avoidance. You win them over by giving them what we all WANT to see: positive results.
For the next 21 months, I beg of you: make yourself a propaganda machine spreading positive accomplishments for our big- and small-D democrats. The people we need to stay in our camp at this inflection point for democracy did not watch tonight. The person they will listen to, if they know you, is you.
I said this earlier on TCinLA’s Substack but it’s what struck me during his speech. He hit it out of the park! I don’t think the Republicans even saw the ball flying until it was over the fence. Nice job Mr. President!
Biden’s address was as good as it gets. He was controlled yet forceful. He handled the heckling without letting it get in the way of his presentation. The GQP has nothing to fact-check when Biden touted his successes, which have been plenty. The economy speaks for itself but what he said about supporting people who do not have college degrees had to hit home for many people. America suffered greatly when we sent product plans overseas so the corporations could hire cheap labor, while they made millions. These CEOs knew that they would never get their items made by Americans for the wages they wanted to pay. We have a president who is passionate and compassionate about getting the engines restarted in our country and paying people decent wages. Level the playing field, that’s what we all want. Biden made Qevin look like the fool he is and boy, was that a pleasure to watch! Loved watching Mitt Romney give Santos hell!
As the song goes, “Let’s get this party started”!
Thank you Heather, for your incredible analysis and presentation of the most important points. Rousing oratory, I loved every moment. I did not listen to Hucksterbee. She is a windbag if ever there was one. I found Murderess Treasonous Gangrene really beyond the pale. Like a disgusting high school senior on a trip before graduation. (I shepherded many during my long career. And she would have been sent home for such vile behavior...) Unhinged she appeared. And, that white coat....! We are all waiting for Garland and Smith to kick in.
The president seemed to relish the back-and-forth with the hecklers. Not wanting to be snarky, but I did laugh with pleasure at his deft responses and the way the Medicare/Social Security exchange went. We’ll see how the next couple of years go…
"And then, when he began to talk about future areas of potential cooperation, Republicans went feral."
You captured the sentiment of those MAGAs purr-fectly, Heather!
Dark Brandon nailed it!
"The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left,” she said. “The choice is between normal or crazy."
For once, a right-wing Republican speaks the truth.
Imagine if in schools, the bullies and the ill-behaved students were allowed to run rampant and treat their teachers in the same way as these so-called adults in Congress treat their President. Why isn't there a procedure to sanction outrageous behavior in the chambers?
His address was so much better than last year’s, uplifting even. I’m glad I watched. I loved his back and forth with the Republicans on Social Security and how they ended having to stand up and applaud for leaving it intact, even expanding it. 😂
The best retort of the night that I read was courtesy of a very nice and witty lady by the name of Lynn Geri over at the Steady Substack of Dan Rather. She wrote -
Lynn Geri
"It was a good speech delivered well, by a good man. I think he managed the right tone, played all the songs I care about. I didn't even mind the fish he threw to the seals who are learning to perform... didn't smell up the room too much. A fish now and then may train most of the animals." (lol ! )
I was so pleased with Biden this evening, he was brilliant! Thank you, Heather, for reporting on that important hour so eloquently. I could hardly bear to look at the sleepy, eye-rolling Speaker. Was he ashamed of his cohorts' behavior? I was. I am sure the world was watching and is ever-increasingly wondering "what has happened to America"?
I couldn't watch Sarah H-S either. Perhaps I should have but I knew her words would not be relevant, so why bother?
"...drawing a different conclusion than she intended." ...by something like 180°
Well done, HCR! You managed to convey the substance and style of the speech, and the lack of substance and style by the MAGA maniacs. BTW, I include Sarah Huckabee Sanders in that group.
President Biden's performance this past evening was an absolute marvel to watch. His topics were predictable, and he stayed away from the divisiveness that gets younger and more hotheaded Democrats into trouble over social equity issues over their perceived rights to self actualization, at whatever the cost to everyone else.
That said, watching the president handle the Republican brat pack in the audience by getting them to deny what they have been surreptitiously advocating for all along was worth the price of admission. Those video clips are going to be part of the Democrats' central campaign strategy for the next 21 months. The president baited them, and the Republicans willingly fell into his trap. All the while, he maintained decorum and kept his Irish temper in check; but hitting the Republicans on an emotional level with his accusation that they were plotting to eviscerate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and then allowing the world to see their angry denials and insults when they knew his allegations were true, served to prove his larger point: these people have no business being in Congress where the affairs of state are handled. They're temperamentally unsuited to the job, and their ideology is anathema to what the majority of American voters deem to be necessary for a member of Congress to do their job effectively. Today's Republican Party cannot argue issues on their merits; instead, they continue to practice the politics of destruction and denigration.
In his own way, Joe Biden is better equipped to be President of the United States than any of his predecessors since Harry Truman in 1947. In the 1946 midterm elections, control of Congress went to the Republicans after the Democrats had controlled Congress for the previous 20 years. He was faced with having to negotiate with a hostile House of Representatives, many of whom wanted the Roosevelt New Deal to be eviscerated, and pretend that it never happened. President Truman was a fighter, and the three-term member of the Senate before he became Franklin Roosevelt's vice presidential running mate in 1944. He knew the Senate, and he knew how Congress worked; and building on that experience, and his prior experience as a County Judge in Kansas City, Missouri, before entering national politics, Truman who had a deal with people and get things done. During World War II, Truman headed up an influential Senate committee investigating graft, corruption, and inefficiency in the procurement of arms and matériel for the war effort. He became nationally known. He hadn't sought the vice presidential nomination, who most people thought would be going to Henry Wallace, the then-Vice President. But Franklin Roosevelt had other plans, and he let it be known to a select number of senators and members of Congress that he wanted Truman to be his running mate, but without making any sort of public announcement about it. (The reasons for that I'll address at another time; but the point is that Harry Truman gained President Roosevelt's confidence that he would be up to the task of becoming president if he, Roosevelt, became disabled or died.) There is little doubt that President Roosevelt, desperately ill at the time he was running for his fourth term in office, knew that he had little time left, and he wanted the government to be placed into the hands of someone whose judgment he trusted.
Joe Biden is a man very much like Harry Truman. They come from different eras, different social and economic backgrounds, but each had implicit faith in the American people and in American democracy. Like the president today, people greatly underestimated Harry Truman, who was constantly denigrated by other men who thought themselves better equipped to be president than he who actually got the job. At the time of his death in 1972, Harry Truman was one of the most respected men who had served in American government. Historians judged him at the time of his death as among the great or near-great presidents we have had. It was not his ability that was questioned when he entered the presidency; rather, the man whom he replaced was the only man in American history who was elected to the presidency in four consecutive elections, and the man who'd seen his country survive the deepest economic downturn of our history followed by our participation in a worldwide war in which America had played a principal role in bringing victory to the Allied side. Beside this rockstar, Harry Truman was a simple man, with simple tastes, who saw his duty, and worked his heart out to get the job done right. It was Harry Truman, Southern born and raised, who desegregated America's Armed Forces after World War II; and it was HarryTruman who was challenged over his commitment to civil rights for black Americans by the breakaway Dixicrat Party led by Strom Thurmond in the 1948 Presidential Election. Harry Truman won that election, to the professional pundits' great astonishment. After his presidency, Truman went back to his family home in Independence, Missouri, and lived the life of a retired public servant.
Joe Biden is very much in the same mold as Harry Truman. Before becoming vice president in 2008, Biden served as a senator from Delaware, first elected in 1972, at age 29, the year before he became constitutionally eligible to take his seat in the Senate. But, like Harry Truman, he came from working people. Truman had been a farmer before World War I, and artillery captain who'd gone overseas during the war, a businessman whose haberdashery business went bust in the recession that followed the end of World War I, returning to farming, until he went into local Kansas City politics as a county executive. Biden's boyhood was also working class, and his father struggle to make ends meet, finding it necessary to move from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Wilmington, Delaware, in pursuit of job opportunity. Being part of a working family that needed to relocate in order to find a job that would put food on the table is something that haunts people. It makes people feel insecure about their futures, much the same way that Harry Truman must have felt after his clothing business failed, and he had to return to farming in order to make ends meet. When Harry Truman met his future wife Bess, her mother heartily disapproved of the young man her daughter had chosen to marry, claiming that he would never amount to much. During their married life in Independence, Harry and Bess lived in her mother's house. When, as a United States Senator, Truman had to be in Washington, he lived in a rental apartment, modest by any standard. I don't recall ever reading that Truman ever went out and purchased property in his own name where he, his wife, and daughter, Margaret, would live. In other words, apart from his government jobs, Harry Truman lived much like everybody else who had to work for a living. Joe Biden has done better in his life financially than Harry Truman could ever have done, given the resources that were available to him at the time he was building his career as a local politician in Kansas City, and later as Senator. Truman was always a man of the people, even if his economic situation did improve somewhat during the years that he was a senator. Even then, Truman knew that if he lost a senatorial election, his economic prospects would be bleak. He would not be sitting on any corporate boards, he would not have a large portfolio of stocks and securities. He would've been poor.
Yesterday evening's speech showed us the kind of man Joe Biden is. At the core of his being, Biden is the kind of workingman his father was throughout his life. Owning a large house in Wilmington, and a vacation home in Rehoboth, doesn't tell us the kind of man he is. We see the kind of man Joe Biden is by what he cares about; and above all, consistently, and without deviation, this is a man who cares deeply about all of us, even those who didn't vote for him. The odd thing is, at 80 years of age, he is temperamentally the best kind of person to be president of the United States of America that anyone could hope to find anywhere in our 236 year history as a nation. I think he is a few months younger than I am, and yet I am astonished at his vigor, and his ability to stay in the moment. Whether or not he decides to run for a second term is yet to be seen; but he certainly sets an exceptionally high standard for anyone who wishes to be considered to be presidential material. Obviously, the former president was not presidential material and we will be paying the price for that for decades to come. It is long past time that the American people put their adult hats on and see who is actually able to do the job of being president. From what I have seen of the Republican Party, there is nobody who meets that standard. Both the Clintons and the Bushes, father and son, were deeply flawed individuals who set low standards for others to follow them into that office. The Obama presidency held great promise, but he was too inexperienced to really get the job done properly. And, for reasons I cannot fathom, Joe Biden became president at just the right time that the country needed a man just like him. Who would've thunk it!