Fogbow

SOTU POLL: Whopping 72 Percent Approved of Biden Speech — Including 43% of Republicans
By Tommy Christopher Feb 8th, 2023, 7:33 am

A whopping 72 percent of viewers approved of President Joe Biden‘s State of the Union speech — including 43 percent of Republicans who watched. Biden delivered his first State of the Union address under the new GOP House majority Tuesday night, and a raucous majority it turned out to be. One facet of the speech has emerged as the dominant theme of the coverage. At one point during the speech, Biden invoked plans from several Republicans that would cause programs like Social Security to sunset every few years and disappear for good if not reauthorized. The president found himself flat-out arguing with Republicans screaming “LIAR!” in the middle of the speech. That scene was repeated several times, with Biden shooting back by telling his rowdy colleagues to “look it up!”

According to a CNN poll taken before and after the speech, Biden’s performance went over very well. The key findings, according to CNN: A 72% majority of Americans who watched President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address had a positive reaction to the speech, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS, with a smaller 34% reacting very positively. That pattern of broad but tempered enthusiasm is similar to the reception for Biden’s speech last year. In 2022, 71% of speech-watchers reacted positively to his address, with 41% saying their reaction was very positive.

Presidential addresses tend to attract generally friendly audiences. The pool of people who watched Biden speak was about 8 percentage points more Democratic than the general public, marking a less heavily partisan audience than Biden faced in the past two years, or that Trump saw for several addresses during his presidency. The results, as CNN noted, are generally in line with past SOTU polls, but Biden’s audience was less heavily partisan than others of the recent past.

Another key piece of good news for Biden: the percentage of viewers who said “policies Biden has proposed will move the country in the right direction” jumped 19 points from before the speech to after the speech (from 52% to 71%) — and it jumped a whopping 26 points among independents (from 40% to 66%).

RIGHT WING EXTREMISM

‘Let’s Be Blunt’: Bannon Blasts Huckabee Sanders as ‘Not Intellectually Capable’ After ‘Insulting’ SOTU Response
Published on February 8, 2023 at 02:34 PM ET By David Badash

Arkansas Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered the Republican Party’s official response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address and was panned from all sides. Many on the left were angered and outraged as she attacked LGBTQ and Black Americans in a lengthy speech that was tall on culture war rhetoric and extremism and short on policy or vision. But even those on the right seems exasperated with her remarks.

Lou Dobbs, the far-right-wing culture warrior and former Fox Business anchor, told former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon that Huckabee Sanders’ speech was “unacceptable,” and, “an insult to President Trump” for “not mentioning his name,” as Media Matters reports. “Sarah Huckabee went to Iraq with the President,” Dobbs recalled, which the former White House press secretary spent an unusually large portion of her remarks discussing, “and the First Lady in the dark of night, for Christmas, with our troops.” “To not mention his name, to talk about ‘new leadership’ – it looked like the Governor’s Association had written much of that speech, and aligned themselves with Ron DeSantis,” Dobbs lamented, calling it a “lack of respect to POTUS.”

Bannon, convicted on two federal criminal contempt charges, agreed that her remarks were “an insult to Trump.”

“She does not exist, politically, if it’s not for President Trump,” Bannon continued. “I thought the speech was terrible.”

“If you’re going to give a counter speech, you’ve got to talk about important issues. Don’t get me wrong, the wokeism is very important. But it’s not quite the heart of the matter right now, right? It’s not the heart of the matter. She is not — the reason is she’s just not — she’s not intellectually capable of going to the heart of the matter, right? Let’s be blunt.” “This was like written by Ron DeSantis and the entire RGA,” Bannon said, referring to the Republican Governors’ Association.

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@SundaeDivine
"I’ve never seen anything like it in a State of the Union speech – they ran at him like a pack of lemmings and, with a wink and a grin, he politely directed them to the cliff."

- Rex Huppke

bill_g wrote: ↑Thu Feb 09, 2023 8:04 am Orly - thank you for wading through all that crap. I have no idea how you do it. Drives me mad. Most of it is pure brain kill. I appreciate your summaries of their insanity and sutpidity.