Episode 106: The Joe Biden Stump Speech

This week, we dive deep into the Joe Biden candidacy. Biden has been everywhere on the Sunday morning political shows this year—except in the guest seat! But that won’t stop us from getting to the bottom of this top-polling candidate. In the first in a series of special episodes that will be coming to your feed periodically throughout the rest of the year, we take a pause on looking at the Sunday shows to look at the 2020 Democratic candidates for president. In each episode of the series, we will do a Polilogue examination of the candidate’s stump speech—the well-worn collection of policy ideas, personal anecdotes, statistics, and autobiography that make up a candidate’s basic pitch to the American voter. Complete with audio clips and analysis, it’s everything you’ve come to expect from an episode of Polilogue! This week, we examine Joe Biden’s stump speech. Biden has been running for just over a month (officially)—but we’ve heard more ABOUT him than FROM him. In this close look, we break down his “Campaign Kickoff” in Philadelphia on May 18. Here are the topics we discuss: IntroductionSetting the Scene in PhiladelphiaGeneral Impressions The Goals of Joe BidenThe Rhetoric The Policies “That Matter Most”The Final Grade ClosingYou can watch Biden’s kickoff at the link below—but be warned, the audio is atrocious and just gets worse and worse. We had to do some significant audio clean-up to make our clips listenable.Biden kickoff video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-AEAq7jzcU&t;=238s Both the PBS Newshour and C-SPAN audio are a mess, so if you want to just read the speech transcript, you can find it here: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1905/18/cnr.04.html We don’t like being out of town on Sundays, but we do enjoy the opportunity to record these special episodes that explore topics a bit more fully than we can on a typical episode. Invariably, they end up taking way more work to assemble than our regular ones. Let us know what you think! We will be back next week with our regularly-scheduled look at the Sunday morning political shows. Email us at [email protected] or you can send us your feedback @PolilogueCast. You can also follow us at @sotonaomi_ and @bsteidle.If you’re interested, you can check out some of our other work: Brendan’s website: www.armisticedesigns.com   Naomi's website: www.startwithaquestion.org