Ground and Pound

fjbjj

Many years ago, I discovered that I have “long roots” that are hard to numb. The dentist kept drilling into live nerves, and I discovered that the pain was unusually sharp. The dentist explained that the nerves in your jaw don’t have to travel up the spinal column to reach the brain. He described that pain as “really physiologically interesting.” (“Yeah,” I said. “Interesting.”)

Do yourself the favor of reading some interviews with Joe Biden’s speechwriters, because they just say what they’re doing. Here’s one from Politico with Biden speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum, who says that Biden has a bottom-line rule: “don’t be a snob.” Biden speeches have lots of “carriage returns,” with short paragraphs and short sharp sentences, delivering simple ideas in simple language:

“One of the things we try to do in the president’s speeches is keep sentences short,” Nussbaum said. “But really he is the one who modifies his speeches to the way that makes it easiest for him to read. He puts in dashes and spaces and asks for carriage returns on this line.”

….But, ultimately, the northstar is to not condescend, both in the subject matter covered in a speech and in the delivery of it. Nussbaum said that “one of the things I will say as a speechwriter which President Biden has never said but which he gets almost intuitively is that the average American reads at the eighth grade level.”

Here’s a transcript of Biden’s Valley Forge speech, the recapitulation of his infamous red speech. Let’s look at some excerpts:

Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault.

They were insurrectionists, not patriots.

They weren’t there to uphold the Constitution. They were there to destroy the Constitution.

Trump won’t do what an American president must do.

He refuses to denounce political violence.

Subtle, right? Here’s another one:

He calls those who oppose him vermin.

He talks about the blood of America’s is being poisoned, echoing the same exact language used in Nazi Germany.

He proudly posts on social media the words that best describe his 2024 campaign. Quote, revenge, quote, power, and quote, dictatorship.

There’s no confusion about who Trump is, what he intends do.

Take it from Jeff Nussbaum, Joe Biden definitely doesn’t condescend in the subject matter of his speeches. That’s authentic frontier gibberish. By the way, here’s another interview in which Nussbaum explicitly talks about the 8th grade. “That's generally the average American's language processing ability,” he says.

The Biden White House, and the Biden campaign, aren’t trying to make an argument, or trying to present a worldview and place it in opposition to another worldview. They’re trying to program stupid people, pounding a low-information population with simple slogans that establish a feeling of opposition.

Spend a few minutes with Hakeem Jeffries, who has two Twitter accounts — a campaign account and an officeholder account — that invariably speak with the same threatening-a-toddler language:

Not one sentence that needs a comma. They bad. We good. MAGA fascists are slavery.

They gonna put y’all back in CHAINS!

We have eleven months of this simpleminded pounding on the way.

They want to hurt you.

We want to save you.

They are Nazis.

We hate Nazis.

They want you poor.

We want to give you money.

Democratic messaging will be perfectly uniform, delivered by human beings who have disciplined their minds to simply repeat slogans like bots, although some will personalize the message with the remarkable prop of a plastic bag on the head:

Finally, a remarkable piece of reporting this week reveals that the Biden campaign has been summoning national political journalists to Delaware to give them a blueprint for covering the presidential campaign:

President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has begun organizing a series of off-the-record trips for top political reporters and editors to the team’s headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware and meet top officials, including the campaign manager, deputies, and other senior advisors for background briefings on campaign strategy.

They’re also using it as an opportunity to tell them what they’re getting wrong. Two people with knowledge of the situation told Semafor that during meetings with reporters from outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and others, campaign officials have invoked a coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short.

In particular, campaign officials have chafed at some of the coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to some of his incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail. A source familiar told Semafor that with the exception of its recent meeting with the Times, the campaign meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,” and that Biden staffers were scheduled to meet in the coming days with political reporting teams from ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg, and others in Wilmington.

Here is what you have been saying that you should not have said. Here is what you will say instead. Here is the spreadsheet that clarifies your errors. You are not to repeat your errors. You are to speak correctly.

It’s going to be a year of wall posters. It’ll be tedious, it’ll be repulsive, and it’ll be extremely effective among at least a third of the population. Which is plenty, culturally.

Again:

Trump’s mob wasn’t a peaceful protest. It was a violent assault.

They were insurrectionists, not patriots.

They weren’t there to uphold the Constitution. They were there to destroy the Constitution.

All day, every day, uniformly across media platforms.