President Joe Biden's very good State of the Union showing wasn't just a hit among Democrats. Despite criticism that Biden's address was specifically aimed at rallying Democratic voters, the speech not only tested well with viewers beyond the base, it also significantly improved Biden's standing among those viewers.
As Daily Kos' Mark Sumner pointed out, a CNN quick poll found that 64 percent of respondents viewed the speech positively, with 62 percent saying his policies would move the country in the right direction—a 17-percentage-point bump from before the speech.
Navigator Research posted similar findings from its live-reaction dial group of 33 Phoenix-area soft partisans and independents: 76% had positive reactions, with 64 percent saying Biden's policies would move the country in the right direction.
Biden's favorability rating among the dial group jumped 37 points from before and after the speech, ending at 58 percent favorable to 42 percent unfavorable.
The change in Biden's job approval rating—a tougher sell—was far smaller but still improved six points, to 33 percent approve versus 67 percent disapprove. There's still plenty of work to do in that arena.
According Navigator testing among the 33 speech-watchers, Biden's biggest improvements from pre- to post-speech came in these five areas:
1. Stands up to corporations: net change of +83 points
2. Is a strong leader: net change of +63 points
3. Is up for the job of president: net change of +60 points
4. Represents the U.S. well abroad: net change of +46 points
5. Brings people together: net change of +40 points
Early numbers from Nielsen suggested Biden's State of the Union address attracted nearly 28 million viewers—a slight uptick from last year, despite appearing on fewer networks then. But the final Nielsen numbers were even better: 32.3 million viewers tuned in, a significant 18 percent increase over 2023.
Among those viewers, Biden did himself a world of good not just from a policy standpoint but also from the perspective of: Is this guy up for the job, and are his priorities in the right place?
The Biden campaign has a lot more work to do, but the overwhelmingly positive responses to the president's speech suggest his message is also one that he and his team can sell on the campaign trail.
Five months into the 2024 fiscal year, House Republicans still can’t agree on how to fund the government, with a partial shutdown deadline on Friday. While they’re nearly half a year behind on this fundamental task, some of them are playing games with President Joe Biden, agitating House leadership to disinvite him from giving the State of the Union address if he doesn’t send them a 2025 budget beforehand.
Seriously. Here’s Freedom Caucus member Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania telling Fox News that Biden’s speech should be blocked until he sends his proposed budget: “He comes at the invitation of Congress. Republicans are in charge of the House. There’s no reason that we need to invite him.”
They even have a bill in the works to prevent future presidents from delivering the SOTU if they haven’t submitted a budget by the first Monday in February. That’s the deadline set by law, though there’s no enforcement mechanism in the law, and presidents missing the deadline is common. The law wouldn’t apply until next year, but Republicans seem to think it makes them look serious to have a bill, and they will use it to argue for blocking Biden’s speech this year.
“This is irresponsible,” Rep. Buddy Carter of Georgia said to Fox News. “Until Congress receives the president’s national security strategy and budget, he has no business delivering a State of the Union address.”
While Republicans are trying to shift the budget mess onto Biden, they’re facing a Friday deadline to stop a partial government shutdown this year, and they are foundering. The House isn’t even back from the Presidents Day recess until Wednesday, and Speaker Mike Johnson clearly doesn’t have a handle on the situation. Johnson whined about it to members of the GOP conference in a call Friday night, complaining that they are undermining his bargaining position with their constant infighting and chaos.
Members of the Freedom Caucus, meanwhile, are refusing to back down from their demands that a slew of poison-pill policy riders be included in the funding package and for more border security funding—after Republicans killed the Senate’s bipartisan border security bill.
"The only money we're giving to America is to secure our border,” Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH) told Fox on Monday.
House and Senate negotiators were aiming to release a bipartisan agreement Sunday night, but the talks broke down over the House hard-liners intransigence. “Unfortunately, extreme House Republicans have shown they’re more capable of causing chaos than passing legislation,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote to his colleagues Sunday night. “It is my sincere hope that … Speaker Johnson will step up to once again buck the extremists in his caucus and do the right thing.”
To that end, Biden has entered the fray, setting up a meeting Tuesday with the top four congressional leaders—Biden, Senate leaders Schumer and Mitch McConnell, Johnson, and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries—where hopefully the combined forces of Biden, Schumer, and Jeffries can strengthen Johnson’s spine against the extremists.
Rush Limbaugh is a demagogue, an incendiary and malevolent media figure who traffics in the worst of racism and misogyny, coarsens the civic discourse and mainstreams baseless conspiracy theories. Borrowing the playbook of a 1930s Catholic priest whose radio show reveled in anti-Semitism and fascism, Limbaugh is the Father Coughlin of our age. His radio show is vile.
On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump awarded Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which had previously been reserved for people whose lives and work lifted the nation — people such as Rosa Parks, Jonas Salk and Walter Cronkite. By awarding it to Limbaugh, the president has saluted a bigot and enshrined his ideology as a national treasure.
Many political scientists and news media pundits would still like to believe that the Trump presidency rests largely on economic upheaval, on the sense of dislocation and alienation in working-class regions that have seen well-paying jobs lost to globalization and automation. And there is, no doubt, a despair in those regions that can be traced to the loss of financial security. But those workers are too easily persuaded that their plight is the fault of Mexicans and Muslims, that their jobs went to unqualified black or brown laborers.
And Limbaugh is their media hero, a man whose decades on the radio moved his dedicated followers to call themselves “Dittoheads.” And what inspired commentary sends them into such rapturous agreement? Here’s one Limbaugh nugget: “I think it’s time to get rid of this whole National Basketball Association. Call it the TBA, the Thug Basketball Association, and stop calling them teams. Call ’em gangs.” Here’s another: “Have you ever noticed how all composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”
The presidency of Barack Obama sent Limbaugh into reactionary overdrive; he was a committed birther, and he derided any Obama policy that expanded government benefits — even when most of the beneficiaries were white — as “reparations.” In one rant during Obama’s first term, Limbaugh claimed that Obama’s presidency represented the opportunity for people of color to “use their power as a means of retribution. That’s what Obama’s about. … He’s angry, he’s gon’ cut this country down to size, he’s gon’ make it pay for … its mistreatment of minorities.”
Limbaugh also has full reservoirs of misogyny with which to drench women who dare seek equal treatment under the law. When a Georgetown University student named Sandra Fluke testified before Congress, seeking to have health insurance cover contraceptives, Limbaugh went on a vicious tear, denouncing her as a “slut” and a “prostitute.” He made the term “feminazi” a mainstream slur describing any woman who believes that she should have full citizenship. “Feminism,” he once declared, “was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of society.”
To round out his repertoire of abhorrent and baseless attacks, he once mocked the actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease, on the air, accusing him of exaggerating his symptoms. Fox had made a political ad in support of stem cell research, which scientists said might lead to a cure for Parkinson’s, and viewers could see his pronounced tremors. “He is moving all around and shaking, and it’s purely an act,” Limbaugh insisted.
Of course, all that bigotry and bullying made him the perfect recipient of an award from Trump, who has channeled the same base impulses to power his way to the presidency. Indeed, Limbaugh helped pave the way for Trump. The talk radio meister made insults, cheap provocations and racist assaults on people of color commonplace — even entertaining — for a certain voting bloc. They were ready to welcome the bombastic reality TV host.
When Trump entered the political arena as a birther — insisting that Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore illegitimate — his base was already primed for it. When Trump was caught on audio tape bragging that he had sexually assaulted women, Limbaugh had already laid the groundwork for a presidency dismissive of common decency.
By awarding Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Trump has not succeeded in cheapening the award. Its distinctions will endure. But he has elevated Limbaugh’s racism, misogyny and free-floating malevolence, enshrining them as centerpieces of his presidency.
If journalists won’t stand up for themselves, how are we supposed to stand up for them in the age of Trump?
That question comes up regularly when he lashes out against the press and takes authoritarian steps, like blocking access for specific news outlets, only to have other news organizations sit on their hands and do nothing as they watch the bullying unfold.
That’s what happened on Tuesday, when Trump blocked CNN anchors from attending the traditional, off-the-record White House lunch on the day of the State of the Union. No reason was given for the public slight, an unthinkable act of media aggression had it been done by any previous administration. But instead of taking collective action and standing alongside CNN and boycotting the lunch, network TV anchors gladly filed into the White House in search of access.
Keep in mind this week in London, when the newly elected conservative government under Boris Johnson banned certain reporters from a briefing at No. 10 Downing Street, journalists marched out in protest. Yet it’s been three years since Trump’s team has been randomly punishing reporters by banning them, and nobody in the Beltway has walked out of anything. Instead, we’ve seen occasional letters of protest meekly typed up and delivered to the White House door.
Trump’s lashing out at CNN comes just days after the State Department banned National Public Radio from accompanying Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a trip after an NPR reporter had the temerity to ask Pompeo some straight-forward, obvious question about the impeachment scandal during a recent interview. After the Q&A, a furious Pompeo yelled and cursed at the reporter. Then the NPR ban was put in place.
On Monday night, a Bloomberg News reporter was asked to leave a Trump campaign event in Iowa. That same night, reporters from BuzzFeed were also kicked out of a Trump event. No reason was given. It all constitutes a historic, incremental effort by the Trump administration to lock out the news media—and, by extension, the public—from the government’s official duties and business.
Yet news outlets do nothing in response.
In some cases these are extraordinary large and powerful companies — CNN banks one billion dollars in profits each year — with lots of leverage at their disposal. But they just keep taking punch after punch, pretending they have no options.
This remains one of the media’s defining failures under Trump, and it’s easily one of the most distressing. Categorically refusing to stand up to a political bully, news outlets have instead opted to try to play a doomed game of let’s-get-along with Trump, who proudly labels journalists the “enemy of the people.” Rather than taking collective action and flexing their muscle by sending a clear message that the bullying and intimidation won’t work, major news organizations have backed down over and over, to the point where Trump clearly understands there will be no resistance, and he’ll pay no penalty for pushing journalists around.
The pre-SOTU lunch represented a perfect example of how news organizations could have joined forces and said, ‘If CNN’s not invited we’re not showing up.’ And Trump, who lives off media attention, would have been left with a deserted media round-table lunch. Instead, the networks all sent their anchors to the White House so they could act as extras for Trump’s latest performance.
For years, the SOTU lunch has been something of a White House charade that passes as tradition. There’s no intrinsic news value in sitting for an off-the-record lunch with the president while he previews his State of the Union. That’s been true for decades. There’s absolutely no reason so sit like potted plants through an off-the-record lunch with Trump who’s known to be a committed liar. Instead, the Tuesday event was about protocol, and TV networks pretending that not much has really changed in American politics since Trump took office three years ago.
It was also about access, of course. The proximity to power, which is how many among the Beltway media elite judge their success and preeminence. Once they obtain that access to the highest levels of the White House, there’s nothing that will make them give it up.
Last winter, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger accompanied reporters to a White House interview with Trump in order to press his case that the president’s anti-journalism rhetoric was dangerous. But the opportunity was a wasted one when Sulzberger toothlessly objected to claims of “fake news,” and Trump pretended not to know his words were having consequences.
If today’s editors and producers in positions of power don’t want to stand up to Trump’s bullying, can they hand over the reins of powers to somebody who will?
P.S. Hours after CNN was blocked from attending Trump’s State of the Union lunch, CNN announced that his State of the Union speech was “dazzling.”
Bullying works.
GOOD STUFF:
There is no legitimate news value in having an off-the-record anything with this president, and with hm blackballing CNN, attendees should be named and shamed.
