Joe Biden’s disgraceful speech last week certainly made waves. It was what political analyst Jonathan Tobin calls a “cynical election ploy” to divide the country ahead of the midterms. Unfortunately, he says, “It might work.”

The speech he delivered was gobsmackingly dishonest and profoundly irresponsible in that its goal was to, in effect, burn the country down in order to preserve his party’s congressional majorities. It was also the sort of overproduced tribute to a leader’s vanity with dramatic lighting and Marine guards deployed in the background, a visual message that diverges from the humble boy from Scranton that Biden pretends to be.

His weasel-worded attempt to differentiate between good Republicans and MAGA extremists who are presumably guilty of what amounts to treason falls flat when you consider that the overwhelming majority of Republicans — not to mention the 74 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 — still support him and, as polls show, would still vote for him again over Biden. So, yes, he was talking about treating half the country as enemies of democracy.

In fact, it is the Democrats who are waging war on free speech and weaponizing the Department of Justice to settle scores with political opponents with their partisan investigations of the Jan. 6 Capital riot and the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. His claim that Trump supporters are the ones threatening violence is given the lie by the fact that it was Democrats who cheered on a summer of violent Black Lives Matter riots and, doubtless, would do so again if it served their political purposes.

And given that it was uttered in front of Independence Hall, the shrine of the republic’s origins, its disingenuous effort to demonize opponents and undermine the fabric of democracy in what he claimed was its defense, was also an act of partisan desecration.

But for all of the speech’s offensive nature and the transparent mendacity of Biden’s claims, it might also go down as one of the more astute strategic decisions in the history of American politics.

The red wave has been a foregone conclusion according to many prognosticators for some time. But the tide has seemingly been turning of late, and thus Biden’s play might just be a really smart one.

Faced with a losing hand, Biden is doing the only thing that might avert a catastrophic loss by overturning the table. In branding his political opponents as not merely misguided but as “semi-fascists” and opponents of democracy, he is seeking to turn back the clock to 2020 when he could pretend that he would bring normalcy and unity to a country wracked by polarization, the pandemic and tired of Trump’s antics.

In doing so Biden has changed the subject from his own misrule. … Democrats are attempting to … turn the midterms into a referendum on the party out of power rather than the one that has been running the country for the last two years.

We’d love to think that voters won’t be distracted from the shambles Biden & Co. have made of the economy — rampant inflation, supply chain issues, 11 million unfilled job openings, etc. But many voters have the attention span of a gnat. Tobin concludes:

So long as the discussion is about whether Republicans are fascists and if it’s okay to treat a former president like a criminal who must be presumed guilty of just about anything you can imagine, we’re not discussing the economy, inflation, Biden’s abandonment of the working class or the woke racist and gender ideology indoctrination that is flipping many voters from blue to red.

Biden thinks that with enough help from the DOJ and the media, the midterms will hinge on opinions about Donald Trump. That may not be a guarantee of Democratic victory but neither is it a formula for a red wave.

Read the whole thing here.