Who Was Biden's Audience?

As a onetime instructor in rhetoric, I was inevitably brought to look at Joe Biden's State of the Union address from that perspective, in paraticular two of rhetoric's main components:

Audience: The intended readers or listeners of a message.

Purpose: What the writer or speaker wants the message to accomplish, such as influencing an audience’s actions, thoughts or feelings on a subject.

So first, to whom was Joe really speaking? Well, he made some inchoate threats, among others to justices of the US Supreme Court seated right in front of him, but from their facial expressions, it appears they were all offended regardless of their political alignment. He wasn't trying to persuade them of anything. Nor was he trying to persuade the roughly half the country to whom he indirectly referred in his opening passage:

Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today.

In other words, Donald Trump and his supporters are Jeff Davis and the KKK. Nobody on that side is going to come over, and that wasn't Joe's intent. So whom was Joe in fact trying to convince, influence, bring over to his side if not his political oppenents? I think the answer is he was speaking to Democrat doubters, or maybe more accurately, that's whom Joe's handler-speechwriters were trying to influence. Joe himself is emperor, this stuff is all beneath him, but his handlers can at least hand him a script that he'll sorta-kinda follow as it suits him.

Via CNN, this was Democrat conventional wisdom leading up to Thursday night:

A handful of Democratic governors made their way through a gaggle of their colleagues last month to tell President Joe Biden directly what they’ve been stressing behind the scenes: He needs to be fighting harder.

The Democrats told Biden that he needed to show more of the fire that was on display in a closed-door meeting with governors when Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte handed him a letter demanding more action on the southern border. Biden flashed a smile, according to two of the governors standing there.

“State of the Union,” Biden said, teasingly.

. . . Two dozen top Democratic officials and operatives who spoke to CNN said they’re tired of reading that the president is cursing about Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, or hearing reports that he told donors that Vladimir Putin is “a crazy SOB” and that MAGA Republicans are worse than segregationists. They want to see that passion and fire out in public as assurances that the president’s behind-the-scenes demeanor doesn’t match the public perception of the 81-year-old commander-in-chief are wearing thin.

Well, be careful what you wish for. His handlers told him the lizard people want passion and fire. At some level, Joe may have abosrbed this, especially in the context of a potential move to dump him from the ticket, but he likely understands this probably won't happen under any circumstance. Nevertheless, his handlers gave him a script and a schedule, the big speech Thursday, a Pennsylvania rally on Friday, an interview with Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC and something called a national organizing call on Saturday. His response to any perceived urgency was at best passive-aggressive.

On Friday,

Joe Biden’s handlers decided to send him out on the road for a rally on Friday following his disastrous State of the Union Address Thursday night.

. . . The speech obviously took its toll. On Friday night Joe Biden traveled to Pennsylvania for a small rally of supporters. Joe was shot.

. . . Joe Biden: “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you: Send me to Congress.”

. . . Biden then told the crowd that our freedoms came under attack on July the 6th? Huh?

. . . And Joe Biden admitted that almost every world leader has grabbed his arm, pulled him aside, and said, “You can’t win again.”

In the Capehart interview:

He apologized for calling Laken Riley's accused killer "illegal," saying he should not have done that and that illegal aliens "built the country."

. . . On top of that, he was all over the place on Israel, saying he didn't have a "red line" but then saying that Israel can't go too far. He was delusional about how much the left hates him on Israel. He claimed it wasn't a "widely shared sentiment" that he was assisting in genocide by helping the Jewish state.

At the virtual rally the same day:

He was doing a virtual campaign event on Saturday, but even with his handler wife by his side, he was clearly struggling not only to read the teleprompter but to have any kind of coherence and to understand what he was trying to say.

. . . He not only seemed unable to read the words, but then once that threw him, he had a problem with tenses, saying, "We have to start off by vaccinating America," when he should have said past tense. It was clear that he was talking about the past, but he still got the tenses messed up.

Biden was REALLY struggling to read his teleprompter during his virtual "national organizing call" 😳 pic.twitter.com/NbcxnLo0xW

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 10, 2024

He doesn't want to do this, he's humoring his handlers, and his heart isn't in it. On top of the first two events on Saturday, he had a rally in Atlanta last night. I don't see how he can maintain this kind of schedule, but the people behind it are his handlers, who want to keep their jobs, and Dr Jill, who also wants to keep the First Lady gig. The purpose, the second part of rhetoric that I listed above, is for Dr Jill and his handlers at leaat to keep their jobs past the convention and wait for some miracle to pull things out after that. They mean to do this by convincing the lizard people they're at least going through the motions.

The problem is that the more you get Joe out in front of the public, the more you just get Joe, and Joe doesn't have the stamina to keep this up. But the lizard people don't really have any options. The question is how long until Joe balks and goes back to the beach.