The Post has an interesting story today about why both presidential campaigns seem to feel they have an interest in leaning into Biden’s stutter. The stutter is something that earlier iterations of Biden’s political life story narrative treated as a challenge he overcame in the past, in his childhood. But as a President it’s clear he did not entirely overcome it. He may have tamed it. But it’s still there and it’s a component of his sometimes halting or garbled speech. The change — from describing the stutter as something Biden overcame to something he still wrestles with — has a few different drivers. One is that we just think about these things differently today as a society. It’s what we might call the Therapeutic Turn in American culture. It’s that whole mix of the valorization of empathy, the therapeutic overcoming of physical, intellectual or mental challenges and the call for society to loosen or expand the strictures of what is acceptable for full participation in public life. It’s deeply ingrained in what we might call Blue State political culture.

The chart below is from something called the CBC 2023 Resident Survey. It’s a survey of New York City residents in which residents share their opinion about the city’s quality of life and government services. It purports to be “the most comprehensive, statistically valid, post-pandemic view into how New Yorkers feel about the City’s quality of life and how they rate City government services.” For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to assume the claim about statistical validity is accurate. And most importantly, it says that the methodology used in the previous two surveys is roughly the same, thus giving us some fair measure of change over time.

Needless to say, the change from 2008 and 2017 to 2023 is quite stark.

If you’ve followed the uproar over ex-President Trump’s promise of a “bloodbath” if he’s not elected you’ll see it’s partly been diverted into a kind of textualist grudge match over whether he meant apocalyptic and blood-drenched civil violence or simply stiff competition for the U.S. auto industry. If you look at the actual words it seems clear he initially riffs on his claims about the auto industry but then doubles down on the promise of a bloodbath, suggesting that problems with the economy will be the least of the country’s problems. You can interpret it either way in large part because Trump always expresses himself in the kind of disjointed word salad which always require the words to be reconstructed after the fact, thus giving a fair amount of leeway to whoever wants to do the interpreting and reconstructing.

But that’s a feature, not a bug.

Here is a small bundle of updates on significant events unfolding in Israel and Gaza which are mostly out of the US headlines.

With so many weighty issues pressing upon us for attention I was surprised by a new story yesterday evening which sparked some joy.

Let’s go to Ohio where three Republicans are vying for the opportunity to unseat three-term Senator Sherrod Brown, a highly effective politician who nonetheless now faces reelection in an increasingly Republican state. State Sen Matt Dolan, son of the owner of the Cleveland Guardians, is the GOP normie candidate — we’ll be normal if you just give us your tax cuts. Another candidate, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, latched himself to the desperate Hindenberg of an effort to defeat Ohio’s abortion rights referendum. And then there’s Bernie Moreno, a businessman and full-on Trumper (though also, as is often the case, a one-time Trump critic). Basically LaRose and Moreno both pushed hard for the Trump vote and endorsement. But Moreno won that fight. He got J.D. Vance to endorse him almost a year ago. And then Vance seemed to play an important role in getting a lot of key MAGA luminaries, eventually including Trump himself, to get behind Moreno.

There was really quite a stunning development in the Senate this afternoon. Schumer went to the floor to call for new elections in Israel, calling Netanyahu “an obstacle to peace” and going on to say he is pursuing “dangerous and inflammatory policies that test existing standards for assistance.” If Netanyahu remains in power after the war, the U.S. should “play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course.”

These words require some context and deconstruction.

I just noticed a write up on Trump stumbling into saying there’s lots you can do in terms of cutting Social Security and Medicare. The Biden campaign and other Democrats were promptly all over those comments, as you’d expect. But it raises a point that is too little discussed in the campaign dialog. Trump has two big advantages right now. The first is simply that he’s not Joe Biden and Biden’s approval has been low since the fall of 2021. The other is a general sense that things were better before the pandemic. You might say, wait, the pandemic happened on his watch and the worst of it took place during his presidency. But that’s not really the public memory. In any case, those are his two big advantages. And they could get him elected.

What this has tended to obscure, however, is that politically he is very, very rusty. Even in Trumpian terms his speeches these days are disjointed, weird, discordant. And again — not by the standard of who you might want within a mile of the Oval Office. I mean even in terms of Trumpian politics. He’s not the same.

I find it very hard to make sense of what the likely outcomes are. But I wanted to point your attention to a series of developments in the Biden-Netanyahu relationship and the U.S.-Israel relationship that could escalate dramatically very soon. First there’s this article in Haartez which says the U.S. might suspend the sale of offensive weaponry to Israel by later this month. (Unfortunately the piece is paywalled.) The tripwire is a national security memorandum Biden signed last month which gives Israel until March 25th to provide the U.S. with written assurances that weapons sales from the U.S. will only be used in accord with international law and that it will pledge to facilitate and not obstruct aid deliveries into Gaza.

That’s the calendar tripwire.

With a day’s reflection my thoughts on last night’s State of the Union are pretty similar to what they were right afterwards. As I was telling my sons this morning, there are all sorts of objective standards about what counts as a good speech, good communication, good organization, etc. But those aren’t usually that relevant in a political context. It’s better to be a good public speaker than not, of course. But what’s good or not good really only has any meaning in a specific political context and as it relates to trying to achieve a certain goal.

No, really. That’s pretty much what the Alabama legislature just did with a new law, hastily passed and now signed by the state’s governor.

As you know, Alabama created a firestorm last month when the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos in IVF clinics are the legal equivalent of minor children. This ruling sent shockwaves through the United States, pushed a new dimension of the Dobbs/abortion debate to the top of the national election debate and temporarily shuttered the state’s IVF fertility clinics. In response Alabama has now passed a law which appears to have created enough legal assurance to allow the state’s clinics to reopen. This is not just a win for reproductive rights in the state. Numerous couples had their ongoing fertility treatment halted by the ruling.

But as in-state critics have made clear, the new legislation is at best a band-aid rather than a solution.