To whom did Joe Biden aim his Thursday night address on gun control? Politico’s Jack Shafer can’t figure it out either, except to conclude that Preacher Joe may have only desired to sermonize to the choir. Not only did Biden not offer anything substantively new in an extraordinary prime-time address, Biden made clear that he’s only interested in the choir:

It’s hard to imagine that any of the gun rights faithful were swayed by Biden’s talk, as he provided no new argument for the cause of gun control, and aside from the recent examples of gun massacres, no new compelling data. As a veteran horse-trader from his years in the Senate, Biden knows all about high-stakes compromise, negotiation and persuasion. If the speech contained a persuasive lesson about gun control, it must have been written in code. Although Biden directed his comments primarily to the citizenry, he also appealed to members of the Senate Republican minority — the people he must reach in order to pass such new, politically ambitious measures. But nothing in his call to action showed the slightest promise of moving them; it provided them no political reward for switching. Biden neither menaced the Republican senators with threats nor caressed them with promises or compromises that might have split off a Republican supporter or two. Unless you are already one of Pastor Biden’s congregants, his words, his expression of sorrow and his emotional pleading came across as the usual Democratic Party white noise. Filled with good intentions that he drove into a semantic dead end, Biden sounded like a bad Aaron Sorkin speech. Why did he even bother with his address?

Is there such a thing as a good Aaron Sorkin speech? I kid, I kid, as I enjoy much of Sorkin’s work. This speech did remind me of one particularly bad Sorkin speech at the end of The American President, in which Michael Douglas’ character reveals himself as a gun-grabber in what is supposed to be a heroic moment:

Biden took a similarly combative approach on Thursday, in which he didn’t pitch this to Senate Republicans as much as he put the pitch under their collective chin. He never intended this speech to move the debate; Biden wanted to use it to pressure Republicans into a surrender to his agenda. In that sense, this is nothing new for Biden. Despite losing several rounds on his radical spending Build Back Better bill and his attempt to federalize control of elections as well as trashing the filibuster, Biden still has not attempted to do what he won the election by promising — finding common ground for at least incremental solutions to problems and issues.

Shafer nails this point as well, wondering when Candidate Biden will finally morph into President Biden:

Like many presidents before him, Biden has yet to complete the transformation from being a presidential candidate — a status he has enjoyed off and on since announcing his first campaign 35 years ago — to president of the United States. You would think that after being president for 17 months, he might have learned the difference, but no. …

No matter where you stand on gun control, it’s easy to criticize the tenor and flatness of Biden’s prime-time appeal, which sometimes better resembled a political tantrum than an appeal to reason. At eight points in his 16-minute address, Biden implored the nation to “do something” about the gun problem. Twelve times he pleaded, “Enough!” Rhetorical incantations like this sometimes do magic on the campaign trail, but they rarely do much to shape public opinion, let alone action on Capitol Hill.

I missed the live sermon, er, speech, so I can’t speak to the delivery. (I was sure we wouldn’t hear anything new, and I was proven correct.) The tone of the speech in the transcript, however, was vintage Bidenesque demagoguery. Biden sensed a small political opening to improve his standing by venting his moral outrage, which might have had more effect if Biden didn’t make such a habit of these rhetorical tics. It’s posturing and nothing more, a way for Biden to pose as a moral scold while treating his opponents not as well-intentioned people with their own core values but simply as either stupid or corrupt. It’s a long pattern with Biden, one on display for the last 17 months especially as his policies and proposals fail and Americans lose more and more confidence in his leadership.

Shafer’s criticism in this case applies more broadly than just to Biden, though. Biden may be the most absurd of the reductio ad absurdum of the base-turnout strategy where compromise is a dirty word, but he didn’t invent it. Both parties sound like bad Aaron Sorkin speeches in attempting their contortionist tricks in eschewing work across the aisle to address issues. We’ve long had periods of gridlock in Congress, but both parties and many voters have taken that one step further and transformed it from an obstacle into a virtue.

Two years ago, Biden ran on the explicit promise to put an end to that approach. Instead, he’s perhaps the worst offender, and in reality has been for the better part of five decades in Washington. Shafer skillfully strips Biden naked on this point, even while most of the rest of the media remains firmly in Biden’s choir.