Did Biden’s SOTU Speech Turn Around His Campaign? (And Did Katie Britt’s Response Backfire?)

Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore was simultaneously befuddled and creeped out, noting that “if Britt’s speech was alternatively lurid and banal, it was the delivery that really grabbed you, and not in a good way”:

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. …

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.

AL.com columnist Kyle Whitmire marveled at the weirdness of Britt’s speech too, but wasn’t surprised that she didn’t seem real. “Britt’s problem is an old one in Alabama politics — she couldn’t be genuine and win,” he writes, “so she chose to be fake”:

There’s nothing I can quote from Britt’s speech that can convey the strangeness of it — the mismatched emotions, the smiles in the wrong places, the jaw clenched when it shouldn’t have been — just the indescribable weirdness. It was something that had to be seen, but even then, couldn’t be understood — like postmodernism, avant-garde performance art or an involuntary behavioral science experiment. …

All she had to do was look into the camera and read, but she tried to do more. Too much more. Her handlers attempted to brand this political newcomer as “America’s mom,” but instead, she came off as the aunt who’s been spending too much time on Facebook, and if you don’t change the subject soon, she’s going to tell you about sex dungeons beneath the pizza parlor.

I supposed we should focus on the substance of Britt’s speech, instead of its delivery, but that, too, seemed written by ChatGPT.