There is no need to relax requirements or artificially boost students’ marks because everyone receives equal consideration. Their grade for Biden is a D+.
About 70 minutes were wasted listening to President Joe Biden drone on at the annual Status of the Union address. To sum up, the president has been spending his time convincing the American people that they are being deceived by their own lying eyes.
Since he claims to have been a Penn professor before, we thought it would be fair to give him a mark so that he may reflect on and improve his presentation.
SparkNotes summarizes his muddled words as follows: The economy is thriving, border security has been ensured, Ukraine is winning the war (they only need another round of billions), climate change will kill us all, and Republicans are the ones causing division. And certainly not the individual who, in a danger to democracy, labeled 75 million fellow citizens “extreme MAGA radicals.” Also, they think men may pass for women and view abortion as a God-given right.
Anyway, as the Big Guy would say, that’s a load of hooey.
As for the speech itself, it was dull and uninteresting. No pretense was made that this was anything other than an election speech. Everything he said was a rehash of the same old arguments we’d all heard before. He lifted substantial sections of his prior year’s State of the Union speech and utilized them again.
It seemed strange that Biden didn’t devote more time to discussing the state of the nation. Since his approval ratings are so low and the majority of Americans do not want him to run again, he is likely more interested in the future than in his time in office under Biden.
Here’s a deeper dive at how Biden’s speech fared and why. The final score is displayed at the bottom.
Trading on the Market
In his second year in office, the president claimed credit for creating more jobs (12 million) than any other president in history. That assertion has been debunked even by PolitiFact. Many of them were not made after the pandemic but were instead recovered from the ashes.
The president nevertheless had the gall to claim that his administration was making strides to reduce inflation, even though it is far higher now than when he entered office.
Every American who does their weekly grocery shopping is aware of the nationwide price increases previously reported by The Daily Wire. Most people today feel they are in a worse position than they were when Biden was elected.
Biden recycled his old, ridiculous claim that fast food workers are forced to sign non-compete agreements that ban them from working in other regions of the same city. That has already been debunked.
The highlight of the night was when Republican members fact-checked Biden in real-time over his claims that Republicans wanted to abolish Social Security and other programs.
Energy
When it comes to energy, Biden didn’t devote a lot of his time, which may have been for the best. The Republican Party laughed at his criticism of oil companies record profits.
He said oil companies “spent too little of that wealth” on initiatives to reduce gas costs and boost local output.
As an alternative, “they used those record earnings to buy back their shares, rewarding their CEOs and owners,” he added. Corporate America must begin to behave responsibly.
President went on to explain that business executives had informed him his attempts to remove fossil fuels were the primary reason they had decided not to invest. His words of reassurance were, “We’re going to need oil for at least another decade.” In response to the sentence, everyone burst out laughing. The United States will have an indefinite requirement for fossil fuels, even if no company would take a risk with such a long time horizon.
Constrained Situations
When discussing the border, Biden called for a true “bipartisan approach” from Congress. Since this author has already mentioned the possibility of amnesty for illegal immigrants, this might suggest that all illegal immigrants will be granted legal status.
The president added that last year, agents at the border seized 20,000 pounds of fentanyl. What he didn’t say is that law enforcement only seizes around 10% of the drugs that are brought into the country illegally, as reported by The Washington Post. To give you an idea, that’s the number of drugs that come through the southern border every day.
In addition, he left out the fact that his policies (mostly capture and release) are supplying recruits to Mexican drug gangs. For them, trafficking human beings is just another job. Once their customers have been taught how to sneak across the border, they just need to pay them a few hundred to several thousand dollars. After that, those foreigners are let loose in the heartland of the United States.
Foreign Politics
The foreign policy speech largely consisted of a rehash of the president’s past advocacy of democracy in Ukraine. While this goal is commendable in theory, he neglected to note that after a year of fighting, Ukraine is no closer to victory. He repeated his earlier promise to stand for Ukraine “for as long as it takes” in its struggle against Russia. According to recent polls, the majority of Americans are ready to preach peace.
Then Biden abruptly shifted gears and started talking about China. The CEO recently declared that China was no longer “increasing its influence” and that the United States was no longer “falling in the globe” after the Chinese Communist Party deployed a spy balloon over the whole United States’ continental states.
Needless to say, the United States appeared exceedingly inept during the balloon incident. Considering the United States’ efforts to expand American dependence on foreign oil and gas supplies, it’s easy to see how China has beaten the United States to the punch by increasing its fossil fuel production.
Finally, he shouted, “name me an international leader who traded places with Xi Jinping!” to wrap things up. Similar to the rest of the speech, it was incomprehensible.
Disruptions in the Social Order
When asked about the border, Biden went straight into a rant over Roe v. Wade. The “most Catholic president ever” has said that Congress must restore the right to abortion since it is guaranteed by the Constitution. The Democrats cheered as they encouraged the murder of unborn children.
In addition, he called on lawmakers to pass the Equality Act, which has the backing of all parties and would guarantee the safety of the LGBTQ community. This proposal supports teenage genital mutilation through sex-change therapies, and that fact should be made known to readers.
Political Arguments
Biden lost a chance to show unity by not paying tribute to Paul Pelosi, who it is thought was attacked by a deranged illegal alien but survived the ordeal. Rather, he used the opportunity to make a cryptic remark about January 6 and former President Donald J. Trump’s predictions about the 2020 election, as if these things might have explained why a madman with a hammer crashed into Pelosi’s house.
Blue-collar Biden is primarily aiming at Trump supporters.
Putting the working class first and promising to bring back American manufacturing may have been key to Donald Trump’s success in 2016. The working class and blue-collar voters across the country choose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. During the 2020 election, Trump was able to keep his core supporters on his side, but the turnout was low overall.
And it looks like these are the voters Biden is targeting to secure victory in 2024.
President Biden said, “My economic approach is about investing in places and individuals that have been forgotten,” during his speech.
Movingly, he observed, “Too many people have been left behind or treated like they’re invisible amid the economic turbulence of the last four decades.” Who knows? Maybe it’s you, sitting in your house and keeping an eye out.
He went on to remark that he understands the hope of his fellow countrymen and values the independence that comes with a steady income.
This is a motivating call to action, and if he keeps it up, it might help him win over more people.
He knows that sharing his thoughts won’t help those individuals, yet he feels compelled to do it nevertheless.
D+ = SECOND-WORST
In sum, the address didn’t exactly set the world on fire. It was business as usual, nothing out of the norm. Make anything up and keep blaming the Republicans. Biden’s address received a grade of C+ because it had recycled material, without any truly uniting moments (apart from the line “you should never gamble against America”), and came across as confused throughout.
Perhaps his approval rating would have been greater if he had written more persuasively and proposed innovative policies for the country (or at least appeared to do so). Though he tried hard, he was only handed a D+ for his work.
Biden’s excellent approval rating can be attributed to the fact that he, like Trump, isn’t hesitant to employ rhetoric that will resonate with working-class Americans. The strategy is, to put it mildly, astute.
Joe, I’m sorry to say that in the interest of fairness, we won’t be relaxing our requirements.