In his speech, the president will talk about jobs, the deficit and the future of the nation’s troubled economy, but most of the attention is going to be on the theatrics in the room. It will be a night defined by the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) and murder of six bystanders in Tucson less than a month ago and the highly public soul-searching that has played out since then on the need for greater civility in political debate…
And in a chamber filled with Democrats and Republicans paired in bipartisan twosomes for the first time, the chances of a “You lie” moment are nearly nonexistent, as is the notion that a congressman could politically capitalize on shouting those words at Obama, as Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) did after the president’s address to a joint session of Congress on health care reform…
Crossing the aisle to sit with members of the opposite party is “symbolic,” Biden said. “Hopefully, it has the effect of generating the beginnings of a slightly different atmosphere,” he added. “Because, folks, if we don’t change it, if we don’t begin to get some kind of cooperation among us, I’m not sure how we [will] deal with the dilemma the American people insist, and have a right to insist, on us dealing with.”
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