Riding high on a string of massive successes President Joe Biden will address the nation Thursday evening from Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to discuss “the continued battle for the Soul of the Nation,” the White House announced late Monday afternoon.
Last week Gallup reported President Biden’s approval rating had skyrocketed, jumping six points to 44%. That marker places him above former Presidents Donald Trump (41%), Barack Obama (43%), Bill Clinton (39%), Jimmy Carter (43%), and Ronald Reagan (41%) at this point in their presidencies.
“The president will lay out how America’s standing in the world and its democracy are at stake,” NBC News reports, citing a White House official. “Biden will highlight what he sees as progress over the past two years to protect our democracy, but note that rights and freedoms remain at risk.”
“He will make clear who is fighting for those rights, fighting for those freedoms, and fighting for our democracy,” the official said, NBC adds.
The Biden White House is quickly turning its earned political currency into opportunities to share the President’s vision, and for the first time in a long time, targeting Republicans whose own hypocrisy is evident as they attack his student loan debt forgiveness plan while having had tens or even hundreds of thousand of dollars – in one case over one million dollars – in PPP loans forgiven.
“Biden’s primetime address on democracy this Thursday will come days after he warned that the ‘philosophy’ influencing the Trump movement is semi-fascist,” CBS News’ Robert Costa observes, “and as [Steve] Bannon keeps stoking talk of Christian nationalism on his podcast and as Trump calls for ‘a new election’ to be held.”
The Washington Post’s Tyler Pager adds that “Biden will be in Pennsylvania three times in the next week. Tomorrow in Wilkes Barre for a gun speech, Thursday in Philly for primetime address and next Monday in Pittsburgh for Labor Day parade.”
As NCRM reported last week, in recent months Biden has become a historic president, battling an opposition party fresh off an attempted coup, with a cult–like leader facing possible criminal charges on a variety of potentially unlawful acts, an evenly-divided Senate, a House with only a modest majority, all at a time of nearly unprecedented crises – domestic, international, and worldwide.
Despite all that, Biden has racked up big wins on longtime Democratic goals, including taxing corporations and the ultra-wealthy, signing into law the biggest climate change bill in history, making huge inroads on reducing drug prices, working to get what is now a massive reduction in gas prices and stabilization of inflation, helping millions of veterans access care for toxin-based cancers, signing the first major gun control law in decades, maintaining and even reducing historically low unemployment while overseeing historic job and wage growth, signing the first major infrastructure bill in decades, getting America’s first Black woman justice confirmed to the Supreme Court, removing the leader of al Qaeda, strengthening and expanding NATO while supporting Ukraine after Russia attacked the sovereign nation, and more.
On November 1, 2020 then-candidate Joe Biden delivered a speech, also in Philadelphia, on the “Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” (photo, above) his main 2020 campaign theme.