Nikki Haley became the second officially-announced presidential candidate from either of the two major American political parties yesterday. Initially she had teased that her big announcement would be today, but she must have been overcome with the Valentine's Day spirit or something, so she jumped the gun. Haley and Donald Trump are now the entire "officially-announced" field for 2024. Which immediately leads me to wonder: "Who's next?"

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Senator Dianne Feinstein announced today that she would not be seeking re-election next year. California is going to get an open Senate race for her seat instead. This announcement was anticipated, although nobody really knew what Feinstein was going to decide. But, speaking as a Californian, I am glad she chose to step down gracefully. Indeed, I urged her to do so six years ago.

Senator Feinstein has carved out an impressive legacy for herself, after serving in the Senate since 1992. She broke a lot of glass ceilings and just last year became the longest-serving woman in Senate history. When she first arrived in the Senate, there were two women senators. Now there are 25. She has a lot of accomplishments to show for her time in office as well, although I certainly didn't agree with many of them at the time. Feinstein is a much more centrist (or even right-leaning) Democrat than I would have preferred to have represent me, but I did appreciate at least some of her brave stands.

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For a little over a week now, America's military might has been called into action to defend our airspace against... balloons. This has led to a frenzy of speculation about what, precisely, is going on up there. It even sparked a bit of a U.F.O. craze of the type not seen since at least Close Encounters Of The Third Kind came out, if not the original U.F.O. craze of the 1950s. This is pretty absurd when you think about it, though, since if advanced civilizations were indeed monitoring humans, you'd think they'd have slightly-more-sophisticated aircraft to do so than the one which travels the slowest and is the easiest to shoot down. But because the tally is now up to four such objects shot out of North America's skies, I thought I'd share my own ballooning thoughts today (pun very much intended).

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President Joe Biden achieved -- in public and on national television -- a seemingly-impossible feat this week, as he vocally unified all of Congress in support of the long-held Democratic goal of protecting Social Security and Medicare from having their budget slashed by Republicans. That was pretty astonishing to see, you have to admit, since Republicans have been attacking Social Security since before Joe Biden was born (which is really saying something, considering he's about as far from a spring chicken as you can get). But suddenly they decided en masse to take exception with this fact, and loudly protested when Biden pointed out what they've essentially been saying for decades and decades. So Biden welcomed them into the fold of politicians who do fight to preserve the safety net, gleefully proclaiming he had achieved "unanimity." This was a warning to the Republicans that the subject of cuts to Social Security and Medicare were now officially off the table. Rarely has so major a bit of political bargaining worked so effectively during a State Of The Union speech. Which is why it was all so astonishing to watch.

Biden got some rave reviews for his speech, which had the theme "Let's finish the job" (a not-so-subtle 2024 campaign slogan tryout). One line from a Politico review seemed to sum the evening up perfectly: "At times, Biden seemed to take delight in ribbing lawmakers on the other side of the aisle -- wearing a Cheshire cat grin when he did so." After leaving the chamber, Biden even tweeted a challenge to the Republicans: "Look: I welcome all converts. But now, let's see your budget." Chuck Schumer had some warm words for Biden afterwards, saying: "Joe Biden was so deft. He let them walk into his trap. He rope-a-doped them. And now all of America has seen the Republican Party say, 'No, we're not going to cut Social Security and Medicare.' He did a service."

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It is always amusing when the Republican Party is forced to perform a whiplash-inducing 180-degree turn on an issue that they've solidly been on the other side of for a very long time. The previous notable instance of this was likely during their whole "repeal and replace Obamacare" fiasco, when they suddenly realized en masse that one of the most popular things about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was the protection of people with pre-existing conditions who had previously been categorically denied even the chance to purchase health insurance. All of a sudden, Republicans started swearing up and down that they would also protect people with pre-existing conditions -- usually without a hint of how they were going to accomplish this fact. But they all started singing from Obamacare's playbook and praising it to the skies as a good thing (where previously they had tried to convince everyone that everything in Obamacare was bad and downright evil). In Tuesday's State Of The Union speech, President Joe Biden forced another major ideological U-turn of this magnitude upon the GOP, ironically aligning himself (!) with Donald Trump in the process. That's got a certain "through the looking glass" quality to it, you have to admit.

Biden performed the most spectacular trolling of Republicans I have ever witnessed, in fact. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a successful "rope-a-dope" strategy, which metaphorically works too. Biden seemingly did the impossible by getting Republicans -- all of them, from the sound of it -- to fervently cheer the idea of protecting Social Security and Medicare from any budget cuts. This has long been a core Democratic goal, although some Democrats have occasionally wavered in the face of Republican demands to gut the safety net for retirees and seniors (see: Barack Obama's proffered "Grand Bargain," for just one example).

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Last night, President Biden gave (depending on how you look at it) a rousing State Of The Union speech or perhaps the first speech of his re-election campaign. Throughout it all, by my count, he uttered the phrase "Let's finish the job" a whopping 10 times (at the very least... I know I must have missed a few...). That sounds an awful lot like a new campaign slogan to me....

Biden's speech was rather extraordinary, mostly because of his delivery. He actively engaged with Republican hecklers, which is a very tricky thing to do, but he pulled it off masterfully. He stressed cooperation over partisan confrontation, for the most part, and called for unity and getting done what they could both agree upon. Which, again, is a very hard needle to thread in today's hyper-polarized America. But he managed to stay folksy and cheerful throughout it all, which is what made it all so extraordinary. I've already seen the term "happy warrior" used to describe Biden's performance last night, and it fits pretty well.

As expected, the speech stuck mostly to the tried-and-true listing of accomplishments mixed in with Biden's ambitions for future legislation. Biden reportedly heavily vetted the speech himself to remove all "Washington-speak" and/or technical government terms from the text. If this is true, he did a great job. He sounded natural and in his element for the entire speech -- it was all delivered in "Bidenese," to put it another way.

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As is my wont, I will be watching the State Of The Union speech tonight and then writing my post-speech thoughts and reactions afterwards. But I am not sure I will finish this effort tonight, so I could either post it very late this evening or possibly tomorrow. Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up. Thanks for your patience.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Tomorrow night, President Joe Biden will mark the halfway point of his first term in office by delivering a State Of The Union speech. He will remind Americans of all the things he has accomplished so far, and he will likely have a pared-down list of things he thinks he might still accomplish even with a divided Congress. All of which is traditional and expected. But what we can all also expect is a "soft launch" of Biden's re-election campaign.

Of course, the official launch of Biden's next campaign could come at any time now or it could even be months in the future. There's no real pressure on Biden to announce, since he seems to already have frozen all other Democrats out of the running. And there's no real mystery left at all about whether Joe's going to run again or not -- all the signs point to him doing so. He's been riding rather high politically ever since the midterms, and the economic numbers just keep getting better and better. Prior to the midterms, there was a lot of grumbling behind the scenes among Democrats about how it'd be better for the party if Biden did gracefully step aside to allow another candidate a shot at 2024, but those voices have all been quelled by the complete disappearance of the much-predicted midterm "red wave." Biden's job approval ratings have even been rising since then, although they still stand just below 45 percent -- which is supposed to be very dangerous territory for any politician seeking re-election. But if gas prices stay low and inflation continues to fall then Biden could be in the 45-50 percent range within a few months, which would be much more solid territory to run from.

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Next Tuesday night, President Joe Biden will deliver his State Of The Union speech to a joint session of Congress. Today, he got some good news he will without doubt be touting in this speech -- the unemployment rate is not just low, not just "lower than it ever hit under Donald Trump," but historically low. The last time the unemployment rate was a mere 3.4 percent was in 1969, before we sent any men to the moon. If it falls any further, we'll have to go back to 1953 to find a similar number. So we certainly expect this to be prominently featured next Tuesday night.

Over half a million jobs were created in January. This is also an astounding number, since the predictions were that fewer than 200,000 had been created. Also, the figures for the past few months were revised upwards as well -- more jobs appeared at the end of 2022 than had previously been known. During Biden's time in office, the country has added an astounding 12.1 million jobs -- the fastest job-creation rate of any president ever. So, yeah, we fully expect a little football-spiking and endzone-dancing from Biden next week.

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Happy Groundhog Day, everyone! Or, to be more accurate, I should wish everyone a happy Groundhog Day, since I speak not of a small, furry weather prognosticator but instead of the movie of the same name which starred Bill Murray. For those of you who have just woken up from a multi-decade coma, the film subjected Murray to living the same day over and over again in a time loop. Which today certainly has some significant flavors of, you have to admit.

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