The headlines are full of praise for Joe Biden’s speech Thursday night accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, which he delivered without the stumbles, dropped sentences and gaffes that have plagued his interviews in recent months.
Politico said the speech “made it a lot harder for Republicans to tag him ‘Slow Joe,'” and CNBC noted that even a GOP pollster was giving Biden “high marks.” Both Fox News and the Drudge Report praised Biden, and the Week Magazine said even Biden’s critics were “wowed.” Fox News anchor Chris Wallace opined that Biden “blew ‘a big hole’ in Trump’s ‘mentally shot’ claim.”
But talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh was not impressed.
“It wasn’t a great speech. … Anybody in Washington who’s been in that town 30 years or more could have given that speech and had it be relevant to them. That was how empty it was, in terms of substance,” he told his listeners Friday. “It was filled with one Washington inside the Beltway cliche after another, related to nothing. Plugs didn’t even give lip service to the radical left movement of the Democrat Party.”
It was intended to be a “safe” speech, “designed to get the reaction that it got,” he said.
“Now, here’s the thing about this. Biden himself may now be chomping at the bit. He may be telling his handlers, ‘Let me out there. See, I told you I could do it. Bring those debates on. Bring the media on. Let me do a presser. Let me at ’em. I can do it.'”
But the Democratic nominee’s handlers “know he can’t,” Limbaugh said.
“His handlers know that he cannot do the debates. That speech last night does not prove he can do debates. Maybe the speech proves it to him, but his handlers know better. It was fully scripted. That thing was rehearsed — I can’t tell you the amount of rehearsal time that went into that speech, from where the hands were so they wouldn’t be distracting, to the angle of the camera to make him look less deer-in-the-headlight eyes.”
That kind of rehearsal won’t work at a live event, such as a debate, be pointed out.
Limbaugh said he expects to see Biden’s advisers argue against holding any debates.
“Because, my friends, it’s only gonna take one, one episode of mental acuity, one repeat of a debate, ‘I I I I I I I I my time’s up,’ when he forgets his train of thought,” Limbaugh said.
“It’s only gonna take one of those. He doesn’t need for all 90 minutes of a debate to be disaster.”
On Thursday night after the speech, former Obama adviser Van Jones, a CNN analyst, acknowledged in a panel discussion that Democrats had set a very low bar for Biden to hop over.
Jones said they were “prepared for it to be a terrible speech.”
“As long as he didn’t embarrass himself, we were going to come out here and praise it!” he said, while the other analysts sat stone-faced.
Oops… CNN’s Van Jones let the cat out the bag!
“And we were prepared for it to be a terrible speech. As long as he didn’t embarrass himself, we were going to come out here and praise it!”
This is what the liberal media will be doing tonight, tomorrow, and the foreseeable future pic.twitter.com/UIfZbPhYVe— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) August 21, 2020
