Welcome to Beg to Differ. the Bullworks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum, from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the Bullwork. I'm joined by our regulars,

Damon Linker of the Week, Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal,

and Linda Chavez of the Niskanan Center. Our special

guest this week is E.J. Dion, columnist for the Washington Post. And we have

so much to discuss last night. President Biden gave his first speech to a joint session.

They don't call it the State of the Union in the first year of a presidency, but it was indistinguishable

in most respects from a State of the union of course with the

accommodations made for COVID. So I'm going to start with you EJ. I'm assuming you liked what you heard this was this was unapologetic all the way down the line

liberalism with a capital L

Well first of all first it's great to be with everybody here. Second, I tell you one of the things I liked about it that had nothing to do with ideology, which is, I've always loved State of Union messages because they are long speeches in which

presidents of all points of view usually tell the American people in Congress

what they actually want to do and in most cases you believe

that they actually meant to try to do those things the only exception to that was President Biden's predecessor where you

could never know if what he said in the State of the Union had anything to do with

what he intended to do. My evidence is in two words infrastructure week.

And so it was really great to hear somebody lay out a whole program very clearly.

This is what I want, this is what I hope to achieve and so

that was cool and it was long it wasn't long in the sense of overly long that

went over time but the list was long.

And that's good too.

Some of my favorite states of the union, I like that old Bill Clinton one that

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