Democratic donors assembled in Chicago for a fundraising retreat reportedly received some bad news from the White House on Wednesday. “President Joe Biden plans to deliver a speech focused on threats to democracy in the coming weeks, according to two sources familiar with the plans,” CNN reported. Why is that a disturbing sign? Because we can only assume that the same phenomenon that precipitated Biden’s last “threats to democracy” speech is behind this one: the party’s declining poll numbers.
That may be conjectural, but it’s informed conjecture. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre all but admitted as much in advance of Biden’s 2022 speech on the menace the GOP presents to “the soul of the nation.” When asked what Americans should expect from Biden’s first threats-to-democracy speech, Jean-Pierre said we should expect themes akin to those Biden struck in a speech he gave in the wake of the 2017 outbreak of racially charged violence in Charlottesville, Va. “You think about what we’re seeing today,” Jean-Pierre said at the time. “You think about the battle that continues.”
But in 2022, we were not “seeing today” what we had seen on that day. No event precipitated Biden’s 2022 speech, much less one as horrifying as what occurred in Charlottesville. The same conditions pertain now. The only development that links September 2022 and today is that Democrats are once again increasingly anxious over their moribund political prospects.
If further confirmation of the political incentives animating the Biden White House is needed, look to the contents of Biden’s “Soul of the Nation” address. That speech was as much a boilerplate campaign-style speech as anything else. What did Biden’s Covid-relief package, his infrastructure spending, and his gun-control legislation have to do with safeguarding American democracy?
Worse still, Biden laundered into the national discourse his desire to frame Republicans as anti-democratic by retailing the speech as an address on a fundamental national-security issue. Festooned with the taxpayer-funded trappings of state power — flanked by a Marine honor guard and accompanied by “Hail to the Chief” — Biden baited the press into covering a stump speech billed as something much more apolitical.
Biden’s first speech on the GOP’s anti-democratic impulses was grotesque, but it was no failure. “Threats to democracy” soon emerged as a top priority for 2022 midterm voters, and it ranked as a priority alongside “the economy” and “abortion” in exit polls taken of an electorate that acted as a breakwater against which the GOP’s red wave dashed itself.
Maybe the Biden White House thinks that it can reignite its voters while, as a bonus, reminding Republican primary voters of their protective instincts toward Donald Trump. It’s reckless, tawdry, and manipulative, but it just might work.