By Todd Lassa
Yes, it was a political speech. At least, that’s how House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) prefaced President Biden’s “Battle for the Soul of the Nation” in his pre-speech press conference. As far as the minority leader was concerned, Biden, speaking from Philadelphia’s Independence Hall Thursday night, might have well called Donald J. Trump’s 74-million 2020 voters “deplorables,” but he did not use that word.
Biden didn’t have to.
The president was not speaking to whatever portion of those 74 million Trump 2020 voters still adhere to his Big Lie; he was trying to wake up his own 81 million 2020 voters, too many of whom would not bother in normal times with this November 8th’s midterm elections. These are not normal times, Biden said, conflating his partisan politics with saving American democracy and the Constitution.
Fail to turn out November 8 to counter the MAGA Republicans – whatever percentage of those 74 million who might remain – and we could lose that ever more fragile democracy to a political movement that would “take America backwards…” MAGA Republicans see January 6 “as a path. … They see it as a path for the 2022 and 2024 elections.”
So that was Biden’s baldly political message at Independence Hall – a warning many Democrats and never-Trump Republicans have been making for two years; that MAGA Republicanism left unchecked would lead the country into authoritarianism -- a descriptor that would have better served Biden than “semi-fascism” from his previous visit to Pennsylvania.
(LABOR DAY WKND 9/2-9/5 2022)