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Welcome to the commentary magazine Daily Podcast today is Thursday.

April 29th 2021 I am John Pothorch the editor of commentary magazine with me as always executive editor Abe Greenwald Haye.

Hyjon senior writer Christine Rosen, Hykristine and associate editor Noah Rothman, Hyjon.

So President Biden gave his first pseudo state of the union that first year presidents give when they're not actually doing the constitutionally required message to the Congress on the

condition of the country. So the pseudo state of the nation and it was very revealing I thought and very interesting although as I say in a column in the New York post today I thought the first 15 minutes were suggestive of a performance triumph not a you know not a substantive triumph and nothing very little that I would agree with.

But that the speech was going better than I ever would have expected that it would and then by about minute 45 or I said at some point in the piece I say I felt like more solid the premiere of Exodus yelling let my people go.

It had gotten so turgid and so monomaniacal in the we're going to spend a trillion dollars on this and we're going to spend a trillion dollars on that we're going to spend a trillion dollars on the other thing and we're going to spend five trillion dollars on this we have a once in a lifetime chance to do this we have a twice in a lifetime chance to do that it was sort of like listening to your kid talk to you about what they want to get on Amazon.

When they're sitting on the computer going through Amazon and by and they put things in the basket and it's like there's 200 things in the basket that they want you to buy for them and at some point your brain just can't can't can't assimilate any more.

This is always true of these like laundry list speeches but this was a matter of a different order in a by think you had some real sense of this.

Yeah I think it's I think that's a very good analogy because what what it what it ultimately made me think after hearing this this massive wish list was that there is something that came across that was actually kind of childish about it.

In a way that actually almost kind of gave me relief and that I felt like the big government project is ultimately just so untethered to reality that there's less to fear here in the end than I would have thought.

Hey so Christina no let me I was listening to Jonah Goldberg's podcast and he had a be stuttered on from real clear politics and she said something I hadn't really thought of which is she thinks the Biden people were not actually prepared for the political circumstances they find themselves in that that all relevant indications and information would have suggested on election day that they would not hold the Senate.

And therefore that the democratic agenda would by definition have to be more either either would be a wish list thing with no hope of any kind of passage or they really would have to try to figure out ways to get things done in some semi bipartisan way just to pull two or three Republicans over and do things with reconciliation.

And because of the unbelievable political blunder of Donald Trump in in depressing the Republican vote in Georgia they got those two seats in Georgia.

And suddenly it is theoretically possible for them to enact the progressive wish list and they're just like on a toboggan going down an icy you know slope like okay.

I guess we could kind of do everything maybe.

And that this has untethered them as as they would say from some reality.

Okay but there's I just want to have the idea of like Biden in a toboggan with with comulas steering it now in my head but there there was something that struck me about the speech in particular which is that for for a president that whose advisers and who himself has been constantly invoking comparisons to the past particular to FDR and these sort of.

Historic inflection point were at etc etc this is a surprisingly a historical speech in the sense that we actually have tried a lot of the programs that he's claiming are going to be are so revolutionary and so necessary.

You know we have head start we have you know we have all kinds of social service support programs for for lower income Americans we've tried a lot of this stuff and it hasn't always been successful.

So the idea that we have to pile on top of those unsuccessful programs new programs is to me kind of baffling the other thing that I'll point out and this is bothered me even when Biden was a candidate.

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