Need a little wisdom, call a veteran of the old wars. Stuart Spencer, 96 next week, ran Ronald Reagan’s campaigns for California governor in 1966 and 1970, and his presidential campaigns in ’80 and ’84. He was sort of the first political guru and good at his job.
Give me a read on things, I asked. He was on the phone from his Palm Desert home.
“Biden’s got a lot of problems but I thought he did well,” Mr. Spencer said of the State of the Union address. “He answered the questions of age and health. He was vigorous, almost feisty. The number one problem he has is his age, but he did a masterful job of showing his energy.”
He does not see Biden facing a presidential primary challenger.
“Their problem is Kamala Harris. She’s an absolute, total lightweight. She doesn’t have the touch.” The touch is that indefinable thing that makes people like you, root for you, sense some magic in you. “Some people have it and some people don’t.” California politicos in both parties, he says, were shocked when Biden chose her as vice president in 2020.
What to do about Ms. Harris? “It’s a real problem. Biden has to show leadership on it and let the party know what he wants—and enforce it. It’s a messy situation but Biden has to be involved in it. He’s gonna have to decide.”
As for the Republicans, “They’re not in a good position. As long as Trump is the reality, it hurts us. He has a personal following, not a party following.” Mr. Spencer has opposed Donald Trump since the beginning. This year he thinks Mr. Trump will face primary opposition. Potential Republican aspirants once feared him. Not now.
“They’re not afraid of Trump. They think he can be had. I don’t think Trump has the strength he had last time. He was unbeatable in 2016. He’s not unbeatable now.”
The party must watch who it replaces him with. A threat is “the Trump imitators.” “To be a demagogue” in America, “is not difficult,” Mr. Spencer says. “You get a lot of action.”
“A demagogue politically is someone who takes any given issue and beats it to death, and the facts aren’t important, it’s all positioning themselves. It’s all Johnny One Note.” “The key to their success is anger, and they call on your anger. And people are angry these days about a lot of things.”
My read on Biden’s speech:
It was the most effective of his presidency and for interesting reasons. Its first purpose was to demonstrate to his party that he’s in charge and formidable. He did that. The second, in my read, was to present himself in a new way to voters, especially those in the middle, and especially old Democratic constituencies. I think he did himself some good there.
Some are saying they heard a lot of Bernie Sanders in the speech. I don’t think that’s the headline. The first hour, which contained the parts Mr. Biden’s people wanted the audience to pay attention to, was Trumpian. There was little in it Donald Trump wouldn’t have been happy to say.
Mr. Biden opened with a portrait of decades of economic ruin. The “hollowed out” middle class lost “good paying manufacturing jobs.” “Factories closed down.” “Once thriving cities and towns . . . became shadows of what they used to be.” He evoked the “forgotten,” the “invisible” left behind by 40 years of globalism. “Remember the jobs that went away. You remember them, don’t you? The folks at home remember them.”
This was classic American carnage.
“Where is it written that America can’t lead the world in manufacturing?” “For too many decades we . . . exported jobs.” He’s offering “a blue collar blueprint to rebuild America.” “We’re going to buy American.” “American roads, bridges and American highways are going to be made with American products.”
On it went. Merrily, to those Republicans who didn’t vote for his infrastructure bill but now request funding, “I promised I’d be a president for all Americans. . . . And I’ll see you at the groundbreaking.”
This was great stuff. You can say Mr. Biden fibbed, misled and exaggerated, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but in rope-a-doping Republicans on Medicare and Social Security he showed real mastery. “Some Republicans—some Republicans—want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. I’m not saying it’s the majority.” When they catcalled and booed he said he was glad to see it—“I enjoy conversion.”
I don’t care how planned that line was, it was good.
“So folks, as we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?” He meant off the table. “All right. We’ve got unanimity.”
The Republicans, as we all know, made a mistake in taking his bait. They should have laughed. Instead, when he painted them as dogs they barked and snarled. Much has been made of Marjorie Taylor Greene and her grimacing and jeering. In her flamboyant fur-collared jacket she was compared, on social media, with Cruella de Vil and late-stage Sharon Stone in “Casino.” That was unkind. She seemed to me more like the colorful Belle Watling, although without the kindness and dignity.
The screaming Republicans are a problem for the party because few national voters feel safe transferring power into their enraged hands. They hurt their own causes but they help themselves. In being portrayed as at the center of the drama they seem important and are mistaken as sincere, which helps them raise money from the small donors they gull in internet solicitations.
They’re not going away any time soon. Mr. Biden seemed to enjoy toying with them. Future Democratic presidents will, too.
Only after all that, as the speech entered a second hour, did Mr. Biden get to the things he didn’t really want to talk about. These topics included illegal immigration, on which he was disingenuous and removed from reality, China, on which he repeated policy without saying the word balloon, abortion, on which he was rote and trite, and “transgender young people” on which he said something no one will remember because no one was listening.
There was never any suggestion that progressive policies exist, or that the woke wars continue.
In terms of personal positioning I felt he was trying to beat back against some rising perceptions that he’s rather a more fancy fellow than he pretends. In her recent memoir, his former daughter-in-law pointed out his Greenville, Del., house had a ballroom. A subliminal note of the speech seemed to be establishing something like this: “Hey, buddy, I’m not a sleazeball hack with mysterious mansions, I’m not ‘the big guy’ in Hunter’s emails, I’m a regular fella.” I imagined him saying, “As my father always told me, ‘Joey, never let them see your socks are silk.’ Wait, I got that wrong. He told me, ‘Son, never look down on the little guy, and never be one, either.’ Sorry, my father used to tell me, ‘Joey, work hard and trust the Lord.’ ”
There were clichés—“we’re writing the next chapter in the great American story,” “to restore the soul of this nation”—but they had the effect of making the speech sound more sincere.
It was more deft, more merry, and more up for the game than we’ve seen him. We’ll see if it lasts. But he had a good night, and it will likely have some effect on how 2024 shakes out.