Thank You, Katie Britt...❤️, Joe Biden

As Bobby Jindal and Marco Rubio will morosely attest, when the rebuttal to the State of the Union address gets as much or even more coverage than the speech itself, something has gone horribly wrong.  This year’s entrant, freshman Alabama Senator Katie Britt, almost certainly agrees. She may well have been the most disastrous choice to handle the thankless chore since this feeble attempt at counter-programming officially began as an annual event in 1982.

Not to belabor a performance that evoked guffaws on the left and—at best—befuddlement on the right, both Britt’s delivery, seemingly lifted from an elementary school play, and the content, which included a ludicrously inaccurate tale of sex trafficking, has been gleefully exploited by most news outlets and was memorialized by Scarlett Johansson on Saturday Night Live in a send-up rivaling Tina Fey’s now classic transformation into Sarah Palin. 

(Britt did receive some forced praise, including from her fellow Alabama Senator, Tommy “Coach” Tuberville, who one can only hope is not quite as dumb as he seems to be every time he opens his mouth.  It does, however, make one wonder what are considered the appropriate credentials to run for office in Alabama.)

But the most significant feature of Britt’s bomb-out was the contrast it provided to Joe Biden, who Republicans had widely predicted would need to be helped to the stage and would then deliver his address in an aging, croaky whisper, all the while clutching the podium to keep from falling over.  Instead, as the nation saw, Biden was animated, energetic—and then some—and not only dominated the hour, but also parried interruptions from Republicans sufficiently rude to try to throw him off.  The only zombie to be seen that night was Katie Britt—who has been referred to more than once as a Stepford wife.

Britt’s adventures on national news stretched beyond her Scarlett letter.  She was forced to admit…on Fox News, no less…that the twelve-year-old she claimed was sexually trafficked due to Biden’s border policies had not only never been in United States, but also that the incident had occurred in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. 

All in all, not exactly a performance to propel Britt, a “rising star in the Republican Party,” to the sort of prominence she was likely assured would follow her “view from my kitchen.”

Still, Biden and the Democrats are lucky she was SO bad because the delight with which her performance was vilified distracted most pundits from a Biden blunder that might otherwise have been the story of the night.

Responding to heckling from Marjorie Taylor Greene, who challenged Biden to “say the name” of Laken Riley, the twenty-two-year-old nursing student murdered while out for a run at the University of Georgia, Biden referred to her killer, Jose Ibarra, as “illegal.” After pushback from progressives, Biden subsequently said he should have used the term “undocumented.” 

Liberal criticism notwithstanding, Biden’s error was not in his initial reference to Ibarra as illegal, which is precisely what he is, but rather in acceding to pressure and modifying the description.  Using “undocumented” to describe a man who committed a brutal murder of an innocent young woman could have been a windfall for Republicans trying to woo independents in swing states, of which Georgia is one.  But, although conservatives focused on Biden’s retraction, mainstream media was sufficiently enticed by Britt’s comic possibilities that Biden pretty much escaped.

It might not happen again.

That Democrats have long suffered from poor messaging is no secret. Every few weeks, it seems, brings a new lament about the failure of the party to persuade voters, even their own, that their programs and their vision are superior to the false promises peddled by Republicans. As Michael Tomasky wrote, “There’s always a lot of grumbling about Democratic messaging, and for good reason: It’s generally pretty bad—defensive and unimaginative.”

Key to the Democrats’ past failures is that, unlike Republicans, they have historically lacked an appreciation for the power of effective use of language.  In recent years, however, it seemed that maybe they had gotten the hint.

After decades of frustration, the party initiated sloganeering shifts on two key issues and have since been making progress with both.  In abortion, “pro-choice” has been supplanted by “reproductive rights,” and in the Second Amendment debate, “gun control” has been replaced by “gun safety.” Each reflects increased cognizance of how the terms are absorbed by voters who are not ideologically frozen to one side of the question or the other.  With abortion particularly, the change in language coincided with Dobbs, as big a gift as Republicans have given Democrats in some time, and the results have been obvious.

But Democrats, who only belatedly realized that immigration was a crisis, have still not learned the right way to talk about it. 

The term “undocumented” must go.  No one refers to someone arrested for DUI without a license after a fatal hit-and-run as an “undocumented driver.”  Applying the term to migrants implies that liberals don’t care about following the law and, by inference, don’t care about crime either.  “Undocumented” is a soft toss to conservatives who have and will continue to use it to mount successful attacks.

Instead, the left should agree that millions are here illegally but instead stress the enormous contributions these very immigrants make to the American economy.  Most work incredibly hard for little pay with no benefits and in the process keep food and housing prices from soaring—a nice inflation argument—and in many cases provide the nation with the foot soldiers that remain the backbone of the military.

Democrats also need to be a lot more effective in differentiating the overwhelming number of those who cross our borders illegally with the intention of contributing to the health and wealth of America, asking little in return, from the criminal few who allow detractors to condemn the rest.

Immigration promises to be a key issue in November and Democrats from Biden on down would do well to learn from their past mistakes and take the same semantic axe to “undocumented” as they did with other phrases that cost them votes.

Bonus content 😇: I just got this wonderful blurb for my new book, Imperfect Union:

"In this engaging and insightful book, Lawrence Goldstone shows how the Constitution, which Americans venerate so much, is incomplete and partial. Taking us on a tour of the text and our shared history under it, Imperfect Union shows how things the Constitution overlooks have sowed two centuries of dissension and today threaten to undermine our republic. Wonderfully written and thoughtfully critical, Imperfect Union is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the Constitution works - and how it doesn't." -Adam Winkler, Connell Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law and National Book Award finalist for We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.