DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Joe Biden’s Blundering, Insincere Philadelphia Speech.

Joe Biden’s speech last night at Independence Hall in Philadelphia was a disaster — several bad ideas terribly executed at once. It was a speech that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, delivered by a man who didn’t believe it. And it will come back to bite him in court and on the campaign trail. Let us count the ways.

Problem #1: Giving the speech at all. Biden’s greatest political asset is when Americans are focused on Donald Trump and not on the bumbling, rambling fossil in the White House and his overreaching and under-delivering presidency. A big, set-piece Biden speech that was supposed to highlight Trump instead consumed media attention that would be, for the Democrats’ interests, better spent on more news cycles about Mar-a-Lago and Trump talking about holding a do-over election.

Problem #2: The title. Biden’s speech was entitled “The Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation.” If Biden is trying to present himself as a unifying, back-to-normalcy figure who can calm the waters — a guy who, in the words of the speech itself, wants to “see politics not as total war but mediation of our differences” — talking about a “continued battle” won’t help. If he wants to reassure us that the president is sticking to his day job, talking about how he wants to shape “the soul of the nation” won’t help. And really, talking about a national crisis of soul is reminiscent of nothing so much as Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, which is remembered today simply as the “malaise” speech. The scorched-earth partisanship of the speech is a replay of his disastrous Georgia voting-rights speech.

Problem #3: The staging. Independence Hall was lit up as if somebody directing one of the later Star Wars sequels said, “We want the new Empire to look just a little more Nazi.” The building was dark, but with blood-red eagle wings and Marines flanking an angry, fist-shaking Biden. The photos from this speech are certain to be used by a lot of campaigns this fall — none of them Democrats. Even aside from the politics, if Biden wanted to reassure ordinary Americans that he isn’t declaring some sort of war on his political enemies — taking a page from the Democratic Party adviser who declared that “the Republican Party is basically a domestic terrorist cell at this point and they should be treated as such” — he accomplished precisely the opposite. The best thing you could say about the staging is that it reminds us that this White House is run by incompetent amateurs who couldn’t get jobs on the Obama team.

And focus on the hyper-online, politics-obsessed segment of Twitter as their intended audience. The “Dark Brandon” meme is amusing if you’re in on the joke — but imagine how bizarre Thursday night’s clusterfark appeared to the average low information voter who isn’t politics-obsessed. Fortunately for Biden, the original big three networks avoided it: Broadcast Networks Pass On Carrying Joe Biden’s Primetime Speech. “ABC ran Press Your Luck, CBS went with a Young Sheldon rerun and NBC with a Law & Order replay. CNN and MSNBC carried the address, as did news division streaming channels, but Fox News stuck with Tucker Carlson and his critique of the speech as it was happening.”