The big story of the 2024 State of the Union address was Joe Biden’s aggressive, upbeat delivery in defending his presidency and blasting “my predecessor” (13 times, reportedly). But a secondary story that is probably already capturing the attention of delighted comedians and horrified elocution teachers was Alabama senator Katie Britt’s official SOTU response for the Republican Party. To mention a less-important impression first, her more-than-17-minute speech was very long for this sort of thing, apparently because Britt took a prepared text and added some insta-reactions to Biden’s address. But pasted together or not, the speech was uniformly strange.
The substance, so to speak, was right from the Donald Trump American Carnage repertoire, treating the condition of the country as a vast hellscape of rampaging immigrants, blighted communities, and terrified, impoverished families.
Here is the story she told during a very long, very drawn-out section on border policies:
When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex-trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on end.
We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it. President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace. It’s despicable. And it’s almost entirely preventable.
Soon after, she recounted meeting a man in his 70s who said he needed to take job at a gas station after retiring in order to afford his medication. People facing a choice between food and medicine has long been a bromide of left-wing populist politics, now appropriated by Britt.
She didn’t shirk from right-wing golden oldies, either: “For years, the left has coddled criminals and defunded the police — all while letting repeat offenders walk free.” What any of this has to do with Joe Biden was left unclear. But she left the real burst of clichés for the climax of her remarks:
Just ask yourself, are you better off now than you were three years ago?
There is no doubt we’re at a crossroads. We all feel it. But here’s the good news: We the People are still in the driver’s seat. We get to decide whether our future will grow brighter or whether we settle for an America in decline.
If Britt’s speech was alternatively lurid and banal, it was the delivery that really grabbed you, and not in a good way. Watch the high-school Shakespearean drama with which he makes this indictment of Biden’s China policies:
And here she is expressing Republican empathy with families in a way that suggests an attempt at hypnotism:
Like she was auditioning for a soap-opera role that required a broad range of over-the-top emotions, Britt went from weepy to furious to gleeful to solemn, and executed abrupt changes in pitch and volume.
Long before she spoke, the Britt team circulated a memo filled with talking points which now seem about as dissonant as the speech itself. Per the New York Times:
“She came off like America’s mom — she gets it,” the document helpfully suggested. “She’s one of us. That’ll be families’ takeaway watching this.” But Ms. Britt also came across like Ronald Reagan, it declared. “The conclusion of her border section was a real ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’ moment,” another talking point said, referring to Reagan’s historic speech in Berlin. … The talking points compared her State of the Union response to some of the most famous oratory in American history, calling it “reminiscent of Reagan’s message of that Shining City on a Hill.”
Comparing Ms. Britt to Mr. Biden, the document suggested saying that “it wasn’t just the massive age gap/contrast between the two” but that Ms. Britt “exposed a relatability gap — a truly generational schism.” …
“His speech was tone deaf,” the talking points declared, before either Mr. Biden or Ms. Britt had uttered a word. “Hers was the perfect pitch.”
Well, Britt’s speech sure was perfectly pitchy, if nothing else.
What’s odd is that I am almost certain that Britt is very smart; she was a Senate chief of staff and president of her state’s top business lobby before running for office. Her colleagues on both sides of the aisle seem to like and respect her. But on Thursday night, she came across as perhaps the less impressive of the two Alabama senators — and her colleague is Tommy Tuberville.
Perhaps like Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana wonder-boy who bombed in his State of the Union response to Barack Obama in 2009, Britt felt the need to talk down to her audience, or maybe she was over-coached. At one point, she said “the American Dream has turned into a nightmare.” Personally, I fear I will encounter Katie Britt in my nightmares, whispering “we see you” until I wake up screaming.
This post has been updated.
