Joel Pollak
speaker
2,500 appearances
9 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Joel Pollak’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 3.
Appearances
And so I wrestled for some time with the question of whether a partisan speech in the State of the Union could also be a great speech.
And
I think he pulled it off and the way he pulled it off was he did not try to establish national unity by talking about the Republicans and the Democrats coming together.
That's the old model.
And I think he actually tried that a couple of times in his early State of the Union addresses.
But what he did instead was he went outside of politics and he brought heroes into the room
that everybody could identify with, the hockey team, the soldiers, the National Guardsman who was wounded, the mother of the refugee who was murdered.
He brought people in who could transcend the parties.
So he beat up on the Democrats quite a bit, but also said our national unity is really outside of this chamber.
And he almost emphasized the point physically,
by bringing people into the room from outside.
They weren't seated in the gallery.
Almost all of his guests were people who were waiting outside in the hallway, and he would bring them in.
The Olympic team, the Medal of Honor winner.
There were people coming in all the time.
He brought the nation into the room, and I think that was a deliberate physical gesture.
And I've written about that before, how there's never been a president
who has used the room itself almost as a musical instrument.
You know, if you go into a church with a pipe organ, the building is the instrument because you can actually see the pipes usually on the exterior of the building, sometimes inside as well.
But the resonance that gives the organ sound is the building.
Showing 1401–1420 of 2,500 · page 71 of 125
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