General Discussion

It felt really scattered and out of focus. Most people were tuning in to hear his thoughts and proposed policy about the Israel/Hamas conflict, and the speech ended up going much, much wider. As a result, it was kind of all over the place (the lines about weapons manufacturing jobs were really out of left field).

I looked at the transcript afterward, and I just wanted to take a red pen to the entire thing.

There is a much better speech inside of this speech. I do like that he tied the broader reasons we support both Israel and Ukraine and the idea that aggression unchecked leads to wider chaos that has far-reaching effects. He was almost laying out what we might be able to think of as the Biden Doctrine.

And I like the Biden Doctrine, as much of it as I got out of that speech.

But it feels like there was a speech writer somewhere in the Oval Office who turned in a first draft and figured. "It's fine. As long as it's done." A major foreign policy speech probably shouldn't sound like how I treat my college papers.

The attitude and policy are good. The writing was ooft.