Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host Sarah Isger joined by David French and Jonah

Goldberg. We will start with President Biden's speech this week on democracy once again. And of course,

we're going to answer all of your questions about the midterm elections.

Let's dive right in. Jonah, the president gave a speech this week, not with sort of a star

war Z and backdrop at Independence Hall. This time it was a union station, though you wouldn't

have known that it was really just a blue curtain with some American flags, better lighting, as they

say. But the speech was largely a rerun of what he had said at Independence Hall, democracy under

threat. That's why you need to vote for Democrats attacking mega Republicans. He opened, of course,

though, with the attack on Paul Pelosi. What did you think?

Yeah, I mean, so I have like a fairly big rant that I want to do is like a g file on this,

which is probably off of the Punditry train. So I'll save some of that for later. But I think,

first of all, we were just talking about it before we started recording. The advanced people

clearly overcompensated in the other direction where it's sort of like from the from the Philly

speech to this, it's like emperor, emperor Palpatine moves to the Ramada, right? And it felt like,

annex conference room B at the Ramada by the airport with some extra American flags.

Which is sad because union station is beautiful. It's historic. It's two blocks from Capitol Hill,

but you had no way to know that watching. So I would love to see it. Maybe we can get some

of the dispatches to it. There could be some good reporting there about, because it's such a bad,

with such a bad setup. Maybe they were terrified of reports of them clearing homeless out of the

union station to have the shot that they wanted, right? Because the place really is kind of overrun

with almost people these days. Anyway, I think it was a weird speech. If you read the political

right up on it, their position, their reporting on it was that this is just something that Biden felt

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