Spun ’right round

It was the annual occasion for cynical stagecraft and rhetorical claptrap, all to vanish as usual in a week.

Joe Biden professed optimism in his hollow State of the Union calls for bipartisanship, which is quite out of the question, at least in the fringe-controlled House of Representatives.

Sarah Sanders conveyed scorn in her response.

Thus both represented their party bases well. They dispatched their assignments somewhere between adequately and triumphantly.

Democrats need to make a happy case that the nation is doing better than we think. They need to leave the feigned impression that they’re reaching out for bipartisanship, leaving the Republicans as blame-worthy if something like a debt default happens.

Republicans need to feed their base by disdaining these modern liberal evolutions from an all-white, all-straight

“Leave it to Beaver” world. They don’t want any bipartisanship with woke liberals who, they complain, can’t even say anymore what a woman is.

Both our president and our governor spun like spinning tops.

He did so with the mildly doddering aplomb of a lifelong Washingtonian who has forgotten more politics than most people know.

She did so as a woman trained as a political operative and so disciplined in messaging that she was described by her college political science professor as a “superior political athlete.”

Biden spun the misrepresentation that his administration had cut the federal debt by $1.7 trillion, far more, he said, than any other administration ever. All that meant in truth was that we’re not having to print as much money as we did when the pandemic had our economy stymied, businesses closed, workers homebound and our state and local governments, which can’t print their own money, up against bankruptcy.

Sanders spun the misrepresentation that the Biden administration oppresses us into saluting the woke left’s flags, which has not happened to me and I’d wager has not happened to you, even metaphorically.

Most of us go about our daily lives oblivious to any woke-left oppression until the Republicans scornfully tell us they’ll deliver us from it.

Most of us don’t concern ourselves with how others declare their gender or do their sex. Perhaps a few have had a gender faux pas moment. But that’s hardly the contemporary burden we want addressed in a formal response to a State of the Union speech.

Biden didn’t bring up the culture, and Democrats don’t bring it up much. Biden talked about everything else, from building new infrastructure to abortion to police reform.

It comes down to these positions: Democrats offer conventional progressive policies and assail Republicans for not giving them any bipartisanship concession. Republicans lack policies now that they have cut taxes and repealed Roe v. Wade. They have come to rely on trying to alert or remind those who are inclined to fear of change that there is a culture war that the Republicans have declared just for them.

It’s a stalemate in that Democrats, with their conventional progressive positioning, hold the edge for the national popular vote, while Republicans, by their resentments and fears, hold the edge in the Electoral College that gives advantages to unpopulated right-wing expanses.

It all hinges on which side spins most effectively toward people living in the Atlanta and Phoenix metropolitan areas and three upper Midwest states. Those places decide the presidency while the rest of are unalterably bound to the blue left or the red right.

In the end, the only lingering effect of events Tuesday evening was that the Arkansas Razorback basketball team put itself in line for an NCAA tournament bid by going to Rupp Arena and solidly beating Kentucky.

That game was more interesting and meaningful than the political events because it was not utterly predictable, not wholly scripted and not wearyingly tiresome.

That’s why I lingered longer via the remote control with the game rather than the speeches.

On Tuesday afternoon, Sanders released portions of her scripted “response” to a presidential address that hadn’t yet been delivered.

Neither Eric Musselman nor John Calipari made statements Tuesday afternoon declaring the score of the basketball game. They could only await with the rest of us the actual playing of the contest as regulated by officiating and decided on a scoreboard that didn’t spin numbers but simply recorded points.

The game was about spontaneous circumstances producing a binding score. It contrasted vividly with the concurrent political events in that it was an honest display of genuine human effort and a dramatic determining of an outcome that could not be preclaimed, scripted, denied or challenged by frivolous lawsuit.

I could tell you that Biden outdid Sanders, and that tactical optimism fares better than scorn, but there is no scoreboard for verification, and you could just as easily say the opposite.

I bet someone will do a poll.