A week in politics

one party I went to and one I didn't

So, off the top, I published two pieces this week. In The New Republic, I broke down the pro-Putin shift in the GOP over the past eight years. And in The Daily Beast, I laid out how dumb it is that Jake Paul is fighting Mike Tyson.

I was putting together the piece for The Daily Beast at the same time Joe Biden was delivering his State of the Union address, so I missed the speech. Not that I would’ve watched it anyway. You don’t actually have to watch the State of the Union. You see the clips on Twitter, you read about it in Playbook the next morning and you listen to The Daily.

At least, that’s what I did. And yet, I kept reading so much (like this piece and this one) about how Biden’s SOTU address shifted the ground of the election that, finally, I had to just go back and watch the damn thing.

And yeah, it was a really good speech. Maybe even a great speech (there were, of course, a few painful off-script moments). But we’ve got to cage that praise with the asterisk that the expectation here was rock-bottom. As long as Biden didn’t stumble into the chamber, slobbering and shitting himself, he was going to come out ahead. I begin to wonder if,