Dunno, Liz. It’s past my bedtime.

[6]

I agree and I maintain that the UncleJoe - plain spoken - even gaffe fest Joe Biden style refreshingly contrasts with Trump slick snake oil salesman style and is part of the reason he snagged 81m votes.

This year, I am going to run excerpts from Biden's sermon in praise of Martin Luther King Junior, to show how a United States president remembered the icon of the Civil Rights movement in his home church.

Excerpts, eh? What, is there a word limit around here now that I don't know about? :-)

Well, you're a good judge, I'll give ya that. :)

I think we can give Biden a pass on the use of 'inflection point' because, well, that's a phrase he kind of owns. :-)

I hope you teach your HS students about Biden's very long history with the Black community as a whole with some emphasis on how he found his voice on this ground many decades ago.

What I noticed here was the higher bar of addressing the Black experience to a black audience (and the nation as a whole of course in the background). In 2008 Obama's speech "A More Perfect Union" set the gold standard for such a speech, and I teach that speech to my HS students regularly. I wouldn't doubt that Joe's speechwriters knew they were on similar ground and had to find a voice that matched Joe on a subject that Obama owned and owns.

Mostly I see Biden's style here as mixing high-flown and eloquent sentiments, classic Obama stuff in other words, with short folksy interjections, 'plain language' translations of what he just said, and affirming repetitions to provide emphasis or to catch himself as to where he is in the speech.

It's choppier and more relatable for an everyday audience, perhaps, but much less polished, intellectual, and sophisticated compared to Obamarama.

It is almost comic to compare this to how Obama delivered the same sentiments ...

How so?

It is almost comic to compare this to how Obama delivered the same sentiments, but that's the difference between Barry and Joe. I noticed that Joe picked up on "a more perfect union".

And he was not unaware that he was an Irish Catholic delivering a sermon to a congregation of Black southern Baptists, and he handled it very nicely I thought.

Again, thanks.