10:19
Well, I’m starting to get weary. And a little hungry, in fact. My expectations for tonight were so low nobody could have gotten over it. But Biden flew over it in a jet (albeit a Vietnam-era Sabre jet). Agree with my takes here? Disagree? Fill up the comments section. Meanwhile, thanks for joining. Good night.
10:14
You can tell the FOX folks know she bombed hideously and hilariously. But they move on quickly as Hannity criticizes Biden’s great speech as “overcompensating.”
10:10
I am totes hypnotized.
10:00
OK, I’m about to start giggling uncontrollably. She is really something! A real thespian!* What IN THE WORLD is Saturday Night Live going to do with this? Probably just replay it, and call it a skit.
(Like-minded speechwriter sez she sounds like an actor going for an audition. Sez the only proper response to this is: “Thanks for coming in, we’ll be in touch.”)
9:56
Senator Britt looks like she’s had about five glasses of wine. Which she’d have to do, to believe this shit.
9:53
Yes, I’ll do the Republican Response.
9:44
Biden just gave a full-on, substantive, rousing campaign speech—but to an audience half-filled with enemies. And he totally got away with it, with the exception of drawing heckles, which he swatted away like gnats and looked cool doing it.
9:40
Network reactions:
FOX: Not a fan!
MSNBC: Big fan!
CNN: I love the Cubs *and* the White Sox!
PBS: ZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz.
9:35
Great ancient Chicago politician who I once interviewed, Danny Davis, tells Biden in the rope line, “You fired us all up.” And he says it like he means it.
9:33
Well, that line about age of people versus ideas was just effing tight.
9:30
The Danish concert trumpeter / speechmaking expert Mette Hojen, my friend, believes a speaker can control the audience’s emotions as precisely as a conductor controls an orchestra. Biden is doing that tonight in ways I haven’t seen anybody do since Ronald Reagan. And what did I know about Reagan, I was 14?
9:22
“Aahaghghgha.” The Biden soundbite from the speech they’ll show most on FOX for the next 48 hours, natch.
9:18
Okay here’s what’s remarkable about this, aside from Biden’s energy and emotional command. It’s that it’s intentionally, strategically provocative. And it’s working. The Republicans are lurching at Biden like Sonny Liston, at Muhammad Ali. Biden is luring them to swing at his chin, but after big misses they stagger, while Biden dances into a new position, another angle.
9:12
“We can fight over fixing the border or we can fix it.”
9:10
My bubble has been pretty effective; first I’m learning about Laken Riley.
9:08
OK we are now at the holy spitballs stage of this. Somebody tell me I’m wrong!
9:06
From now on I’m calling him Speaker Struggle-Kermit.
9:03
How did that cameraperson know to go immediately after Biden’s Social Security remark to the Republican guy saying, “Again? Come on, man?”
9:00
This is a remarkable fucking performance. I don’t know what difference it will make. But it’s as good as any Biden-backer could have hoped for.
8:58
Keenan is the new Skutnik. Literally.
8:57
God, I do hate these speeches. I can follow this train of policy proposal about as well as the springer spaniel sleeping at my feet.
8:50
As a retort to folks who demanded that he seem commanding, it’s a commanding performance. Even Kermit the Frog over Biden’s left shoulder can sense this.
8:42
Boy, Harris is really all in back there!
8:40
“The greatest comeback story never told.” This must be some of the spice Nussbaum was predicting. And that line could stick for a few days too.
8:38
A veteran speechwriter liked, “You can’t love your country only when you win,” and is calling it out now, as the line of the night.
8:37
OK, is it me, or is Biden speaking more clearly than I’ve heard him in years? I’ll have what he’s having!
8:33
The Speaker is having a hard time deciding what to do. Kind of like when you were in your freshman dorm with your kid friends and your parents and you just about lost your goddamn mind because you weren’t a fully integrated human being. Luckily, you were only 18 at the time.
8:30
“Freedom and democracy are under attack at home and overseas at the very same time.” Okay, that expresses the current emergency pretty economically, at least as potential Biden voters see it.
8:26
Wow, the cheering. OK! Was this planned in advance? Must have been, right? Yes of course. Cuz he had the perfect line about it, “If I was smart, I’d leave now.”
8:25
Biden was still glad-handing when the drugs began to take hold.
8:22
I don’t care what you say, Amy Walter is 50% Monchichi.
8:20
Depending on what’s really true in Biden’s brain on a given day, the best way to imagine Biden’s position here is to imagine yourself having had about four drinks and then having several million people watch you from every angle to see if you betray your buzz even once in the course of an hour of nonstop talking—because if you do, they’re going to be talking about it all the next day.
8:15
I always think Josh Hawley was that one flash-in-the-pan Congressman who was in a wheelchair—and when I see Hawley standing, I’m briefly amazed, until I remember he’s good at trotting on marble.
8:12
There’s Antony Blinken, who for those of you who don’t know was a speechwriter earlier in his career. Now he’s the Secretary of State, and not allowed to say “shit” if he has a mouth full of it.
8:10
“I’m looking for orneriness,” David Brooks says on PBS. “I’m also looking for a little poetry and narrative.”
8:07
PBS is covering the speech now, BTW. A friend alerted me that she’s watching the coverage there, “with booze.”
8:00
With those 15 speechwriters I talked to today, I expressed why this is a particularly dispiriting moment for professional communicators in a society where nobody seems to be listening to anybody else—like in a well-and-fucked marriage with so many betrayals on both sides that neither party can say anything without the other party going full-on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It’s a helpless, hapless, humiliating feeling. Smells like obsolescence.
7:48
“Nothing,” FOX’s Jesse Watters says sarcastically, “can happen to that teleprompter.” Another FOX pundit says, “you’ll see lies and disdain on display.” Back to CNN, because PBS isn’t showing the speech.
7:50
Nussbaum says he has seen the speech and thinks it’s “spicy, yes—and also conversational.”
7:40
“If he has a blip, if he has a senior moment—” these CNN hacks inspire me to switch to FOX, which excitedly quotes Marjorie Taylor Green as saying she might shout out again this year as she did last year, if Biden says something that warrants it. Over to MSNBC, where the hosts are talking about their own clothes. Former Biden speechwriter and friend Jeff Nussbaum is on MSNBC, so I’ll stay here for the moment.
7:37
Okay. So Biden don’t always talk so good. And that’s bad news, for a president. But it is worth pointing out that when Trump delivered a verbal covfefe or worse, the Trump White House would scrub it from the transcript. Whereas the Biden White House transcriber takes major, almost pedantic pains to document Biden’s every hesitation. Here are three graphs from the transcript of Biden’s speech at Valley Forge in January.
With former aides, Trump plans to invoke the Ins- — Insurrectionist Act — the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy — which he’s not allowed to do in ordinary circumstances — allow him to deploy U.S. military forces on the streets of America. He said it.
He calls those who oppo- — oppose him “vermin.” He talks about the blood of Americans being poisoned, echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany. …
Look, remember how he fers- — when he — when he refers to what he calls the “love letter” exchanges between he and the dictator of North Korea? Those women and men out there in the audience who ever fought for the American military, would you ever believe you’d hear a president say something like that?
In general—these particular oldsters entirely aside!—I’ll take an honest, shuffling stutterer over a dishonest incoherent bastard every day and twice on Sunday.
7:31
Somebody said that waiting for gummies to work is like waiting for the flaky dude who was supposed to show up with the dope a half hour ago.
7:25
When told I was going to live blog the SOTU tonight my wife muttered as if to herself, “Too bad nobody watches that anymore.” I was on a call today with 15 speechwriters, only two thirds of whom said they were going to watch it. One said she was going to see a Kara Swisher talk with Sam Altman from OpenAI. Everyone looked jealous.
7:08 Central
OK, things are looking up, if only artificially. A corned-beef sandwich and matzo ball soup from Manny’s Cafeteria & Deli.

And a gummy desert—ten milligrams’ worth.
***
I’ve been live-blogging the State of the Union speech for more than a decade now. It used to be kind of fun, especially when Obama was president. My guy had the bully pulpit, and an ear for rhetoric, so there was always an outside chance he’d say something in a new way.
Alas, if you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, you give the SOTU in ingredients on the side of a cereal box.
So to make it all more interesting, I did the hackneyed but somehow evergreen Hunter S. Thompson act, pretending to take tons of drugs …

… while actually only drinking enough to make Washington seem as trippy as it actually is. (Sometimes, up to a quart.)
It’s been awhile since I or any other serious person found this funny, though. I have no memory of President Trump’s State of the Union speeches. Literally none. President Biden’s haven’t been memorable either.
Last year the Republicans heckled Biden and Biden was praised by CNN’s Jake Tapper: “He was feisty, he was combative … even responsive to the crowd.”
At the end of the night, I wrote dolefully:
I guess the trouble is that this doesn’t seem like a rhetorical exercise to me, but something else. It’s like I’ve covered boxing and now I’m watching MMA. And struggle even to describe what I’m seeing and what it means, at least in any way that takes advantage of insights I’ve earned over a life of study. My wife wanted me to skip this this year … I think I will skip it next.
And yet, what else am I going to do tonight, watch the Watergate hearings, on YouTube?
I’ll be on, starting at 8:00 ET—about an hour before the speech—and updating here as the spirit moves. This year I’ve decided that for the first time, I won’t be drinking. Which might be kind of a trip of its own.
Join me—but only if you don’t have anything better to do, either.
Well, I’m not a speech writer. English may not even be my first language, but I will be watching and hoping for the best.
I was hoping to encounter a little more anger here.
I’ll settle for the clever.
Sweden joining NATO today as the 32nd member was perfect timing. And he’s right — NATO is the most successful security alliance in the history of the planet.
And “You can’t love your country only when you win” is already the takeaway for me — I’m betting it’s the line of the night.
Sweden joining NATO today as the 32nd member was perfect timing. And he’s right — NATO is the most successful security alliance in the history of the planet.
And “You can’t love your country only when you win” is already the line of the night for me.
He’s pivoting the Democratic Party back to championing unions — the working class. That’s what’s gotta happen, because Trump somehow had those guys thinking he cared about them.
And lotsa shout-outs to the middle class, too.
He’s doing a great job at making middle America care, and not being ruled by coastal elites.
That was an entertaining and solid analysis done in real-time.
One thing that was mentioned last night that didn’t appear in the transcript: the Speaker of the House typically introduces POTUS before the address begins. Biden didn’t wait for Johnson to say anything — he just launched right into the speech. That subtle but commanding moment set the stage for the rest of the evening, and sent a message that Biden was in control.
Yes, I didn’t notice in in real time, but I heard the pundits talking about it after and agree with your analysis. I think this speech was more brilliantly calculated than even the friendliest pundits that I heard last night acknowledged, and I think we’ll one day hear a cool story about the planning of this speech (setting of this trap).
It was a political campaign speech, not a state-of-the-union address.
Oh, Glynn, you’re disturbed by THIS tonal breach of political traditions? The unspoken message of every SOTU delivered at the beginning of an election year has been, “You’re better off than you were four years ago, and if I’m around for another four years you’ll be better off then.” That Biden delivered that message a little more straightforwardly Thursday night—amid Republicans heckling him regularly and his opponent making concurrent comments like, “his hair is much better in the front than in the back”—THIS is what you’re wringing your hands over this morning?
I was making an observation, David. I wasn’t wringing my hands.