Katie Britt responds to Joe Biden’s State of the Union address from her kitchen in Alabama: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Uh, I’m not sure this is what politicians usually have in mind when they talk about “kitchen table” issues.

I asked former Senator Doug Jones of Alabama about this on Twitter(X). He talked a lot about kitchen table issues back in 2017. But there was no response. He had nothing to say about Britt’s performance, focusing instead on Biden’s winning speech.

“So no memes or reposts or quote posts from me tonight. Just this: I am so very proud of @JoeBiden. He was spectacular tonight, laying out what he has accomplished and his vision for the future – for all Americans, not just a select few. Tonight was Joe Biden at his best.”

So no memes or reposts or quote posts from me tonight. Just this: I am so very proud of @JoeBiden. He was spectacular tonight, laying out what he has accomplished and his vision for the future – for all Americans, not just a select few. Tonight was Joe Biden at his best.

— Doug Jones (@DougJones) March 8, 2024

Kitchen table issues used to be called “bread-and-butter” issues, the concerns of most Americans that can be discussed with the family around the kitchen table. Biden is focusing on the economy and jobs, for example, as well as the need for lower prescription drug prices and other health care issues, reproductive rights, consumer tax credits, affordable housing, the need to protect Social Security and Medicare from Republican threats.

But I guess you have to hand it to Alabama’s junior U.S senator, Katie Britt from the small town of Enterprise, for realizing what it takes to become a MAGA Republican super star.

Inside sources say she is on her way to visit Trump in person as we speak in Florida at Mar-a-Lago, now the top contender to be Trump’s vice presidential running mate. She’s like no one we’ve seen on the political scene since Sarah Palin crashed John McCain’s chances of becoming president in 2008.

“Great job Katie!” Trump said on Truth Social.

“Katie Britt was a GREAT contrast to an Angry, and obviously very Disturbed, ‘President,’” Trump wrote.

She has graduated successfully from the Marjorie Taylor Greene school of political non-science, a.k.a. the School of Spouting Nonsense, although many Republicans even seemed a bit embarrassed by her breathless, over the top performance.

“Not sure whose genius idea it was to put a U.S. Senator in the kitchen to deliver the response to the [State of the Union],” Republican pollster Christine Matthews said in a social media post Friday morning.

Isn’t it obvious? Someone said focus on kitchen table issues, and she thought that meant trying to prefect the MAGA Republican lie from her actual kitchen table. Brilliant!

In panels Matthews has conducted over the past decade with women swing voters, ads featuring women speaking about health care in the kitchen “just sets women voters off,” Matthews noted. “Instead of the relatable look they were going for here — given the rollback of reproductive rights and the IVF fiasco — it sends the message that Republicans are literally trying to send women back to the kitchen.”

Which of course they are, at least in Alabama. Nothing being said here, or on “Saturday Night Live” on NBC, will cost her a single vote in Alabama. No doubt Fox News viewers and conservative talk radio fans are now following her every tweet, sending what little money they have left to her reelection campaign, even though she doesn’t have to run again for four more years.

While President Biden addressed Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia interrupted him repeatedly: NAJ screen shot

My question is, what was she doing watching the speech in her kitchen in Alabama, when every other U.S. Senator was in the chamber in Washington watching in person? I mean, she could have joined MTG wearing a red MAGA cap and shouting inanities at the president of the United States in person. That could have been fun.

Watch it and laugh, or weep.

“Senator Katie Britt is a very impressive person,” conservative commentator Alyssa Farah Griffin wrote on Twitter(X). “I do not understand the decision to put her in a *KITCHEN* for one of the most important speeches she’s ever given.”

The 42-year-old freshman senator with some experience on Capitol Hill working for former Republican Senator Richard Shelby was chosen to deliver the rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union Address as a someone who might represent the next generation of congressional Republicans, assuming there will be another generation.

She is doing what other Republicans are doing trying to keep attention on Biden’s age, over stating the immigration crisis, the crime problem and inflation, ignoring the fact that Trump is just about as old as Biden is, and mangles his own so-called speeches even worse.

“This speech is not what we need,” said Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA. “Joe Biden just declared war on the American right and Katie Britt is talking like she’s hosting a cooking show.”

It was especially bizarre that she came out in support of In Vitro Fertilization, considering it was the Alabama Supreme Court that ruled it Biblically and Constitutionally illegal.

It’s possible that she will join the ranks of speakers whose State of the Union responses have gone down in history as political disasters, although we live in an entirely different time now. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was panned for his response to President Barack Obama’s speech in 2009, never to be heard from again. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida memorably sipped bottled water during his rebuttal to Obama in 2013 and became an overnight laughing stock. So much for his chances of running for president.

This was the third consecutive year that Republicans chose a woman to give the rebuttal, as the Washington Post reported, and showing viewers a young White mother at home appeared to be a strategy to target female voters. An ally of Britt’s sent talking points to conservatives suggesting reactions to the speech before it was delivered, the New York Times reported, in a memo that suggested that Britt “came off like America’s mom.”

A New Speaker’s Many Faces Show Everything but Approval: NYT/NAJ screen shot

House Speaker Mike Johnson, the right-wing Christian nut job from Louisiana whose many faces reacting to Biden’s speech are now famous themselves on social media, said of Britt’s address that she was “speaking directly to parents and families across the nation.”

Many concluded that the tactic had not worked. Griffin, speaking on CNN, said it was “confusing” to women watching.

“Women can be both wives and mothers and also stateswomen,” Griffin said. “So to put her in a kitchen, not in front of a podium or in the Senate chamber, where she was elected after winning a hard-fought race, I think fell very flat.”

Well, for the record, it was not a very hard fought race. She won the general election with 66.6 percent of the vote, and the Republican primary with 63 percent, as confirmed on Ballotpedia.

Meanwhile, Democrats called out Republican stances on reproductive rights and other women’s issues. Many pointed out Thursday the irony of Britt decrying the reported sexual assault and trafficking of a woman whose story she told in the speech, while having endorsed Trump, who was found by a jury to have sexually abused and raped writer E. Jean Carroll.

And it turns out she went back a couple of decades to the Republican vault for that story, since it actually happened in Mexico, not the U.S., and under President Bush, not Biden.

“Sen Katie Britt says sexual assault is the worst thing that can happen to a woman while encouraging Americans to vote for a convicted sexual predator,” Shannon Watts, founder of the gun-control group Moms Demand Action, wrote on X.

Democrats also noted that, under Alabama’s abortion ban — one of the strictest in the country, with no exceptions for rape or incest — a rape victim would be forced to carry their rapist’s baby to term.

While Britt was highly critical of the Biden administration’s immigration policies, Democrats pointed out that she was among the Republican senators who helped negotiate a bipartisan border security deal, then voted against it, after Trump signaled to congressional Republicans that no immigration policy should pass during the election year. He needs the issue, he thinks, to have a chance of getting elected again. The “Build a Wall” campaign worked so well in 2016.

Meanwhile, some Republicans worried that the speech hadn’t had its intended effect in reaching female voters, particularly in suburban swing districts.

Allie Beth Stuckey, host of the Christian conservative podcast “Relatable,” praised the kitchen setting but called the speech “a real missed opportunity.” She noted on X that Britt was in the difficult spot of needing to seem relatable, likable, and “happy, but not too happy … upset, but not too emotional.”

“But the delivery was parody-level terrible,” Stuckey said, “and I promise that didn’t sway any of those suburban moms we’re trying to reach.”

Maybe not, but let’s see how Saturday Night Live portrays her. See more memes and funny videos on Facebook, and Twitter(X) and of course China’s TikTok.

Saturday Night Live Cold Open

CNN covers President Biden’s (Mikey Day) State of the Union address and Republican Senator Katie Britt’s (Scarlett Johansson) response.

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