Washington Post opinion writer Marc Thiessen complains in a piece today -- and don't worry that it's paywalled, the free preview is what caught my eye and sparked this micro-rant -- that Joe Biden's nationwide public address this evening is "disgracing the institution of the prime-time presidential address."
On the one hand, Mr. Thiessen is correct. When I look back at the first fifth or so of the 21st century, there are only two incidents that I can see that merit the traditional solemn, stern presentation by the president we see in such times. The first was the 9/11 attacks, and we saw former President George W. Bush speak strongly and firmly about what our nation would do to the perpetrators of those attacks. We diverted our attention from those goals and we unfortunately allowed the federal government to create our response, which is one reason why we have to let Transportation Service Administration workers get lucky with us and rely almost exclusively on hotel toothpaste because our own container must be checked and subsequently lost by the airline. His famous "with us or against us" tone made exceptions for nations which essentially grew the terrorists but also sold us a lot of oil.
The second occasion would have been President Biden addressing the nation to announce that the State Department and upwards of 70 percent of the general staff officers overseeing the United States armed forces withdrawal from Afghanistan had all been fired and their jobs would be listed on federal government websites the next morning. It would have included direct addresses to both Afghan nationals who helped the US while it was there and the families of military personnel who expected the safety of their loved ones was at least somewhere on the priority chart. Ideally it would have said, "We screwed up," although given the president's attitude about the matter it was far more likely to have begun with, "Flounder, you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes..."
As you might imagine from my summary and my speculation, on the other hand I don't believe that given the recent holders of the office the tradition can actually be disgraced. The prime-time presidential address kissed disgrace goodbye and promised to write a loooong time ago. What we'll get tonight will be far more of a campaign speech for Democratic nominees for Senate and House races than any kind of address by the head of state of our nation on real matters of state.
With all that said, I think Mr. Thiessen is not too wide of the mark. If we replace "disgrace" with its rhyme "erase" and change the attitude from warning to jubilant bacchanal, I think we may be on to something...
