Washington Post opinion writers Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent pointed out how Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Republican rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech shows a wider issue for the GOP.
Sanders, a former White House press secretary for Donald Trump, went full culture wars during her address, talking about “woke” mobs and critical race theory.
In their column on Wednesday, Waldman and Sargent said “watching Sanders toss around those extremely online terms — only months after her party badly underperformed in the midterm elections while campaigning against those very things — vividly demonstrates a problem for the GOP.”
“Republicans are extremely skilled at grabbing attention, leveraging their formidable media apparatus to turn the spotlight on the manufactured controversy of the moment,” they wrote. “But these days they are far less good at persuading the broader public.”
“Biden talked about protecting Social Security and the need to continue creating the green and tech manufacturing jobs of the future, many for Americans without a college degree,” the columnists continued. “Then Sanders fulminated about confusing acronyms. Democrats should relish taking that contrast into 2024.”