“End of the quote. Repeat the line.” Such is the senescence of the 46th president of the United States that when he is not flat-out misspeaking, it is because he is reading the cues as he stumbles through the see-Jane-run prose of White House speechwriters. Like life at 79, the teleprompts come at you fast.
We must bear this in mind when assessing how consequential it may be when the putative leader of the free world misspeaks. We gasp, yes, but it is probably not as damaging as one might fear.
Alas, that realization induces as much pang of regret as sigh of relief. The bully pulpit is among the American presidency’s greatest assets when exploited with competent confidence. There was a time, not so long ago, when a president of such gravity called for the Berlin Wall to be razed, and it actually did come down in due course, along with the evil empire whose crumbling he’d had the vision to see coming.
Nowadays, though, presidential rhetoric is as apt to trigger eye-rolling as execution of a coherent plan --->READ MORE HERE
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| AP Photo/Bernat Armangue |
Voters refuse to be gaslit by media
A couple of recent surveys make it obvious that voters are clear-eyed about President Biden’s capabilities and deficiencies. About two-thirds of Democratic voters in a New York Times survey would rather that Mr. Biden not run for president again. The same percentage of voters think he is simply too old to be president. No telling what the remaining one-third are thinking about.
Questions about whether Mr. Biden can campaign in 2024 are starting to percolate among his own team. The truth is, of course, he could barely campaign in 2020.
He remains in hiding, even from his allies in the legacy media. He has held just 16 news conferences since taking office, less than half as many as former Presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama and George W. Bush had held at this point. The press conferences he has done have featured scripted questions from specific reporters. It seems likely that many of those questions have been pre-screened by the Office of Communications in the Executive Office of the President.
He has given just 38 interviews, far fewer than his predecessors going back to former President George H.W. Bush.
There is no such thing as weekend work, as those days are spent at his mansion in Greenville, Delaware, or his beach house at Rehoboth.
Despite or perhaps because of all that, a recent story in The New York Times included the following paragraph near the top: “Interviews, some sanctioned by the White House and some not, more than a dozen current and former senior officials and advisers uniformly reported that President Biden remained intellectually engaged, asking smart questions at meetings, grilling aides on points of dispute, calling them late at night, picking out that weak point on Page 14 of a memo and rewriting speeches like his abortion remarks on Friday right up until the last minute.”
No one with access to a working screen of any type can believe this. --->READ MORE HEREFollow links below to related stories:
Biden points to ‘selfishness’ of American troops in Saudi speech gaffe
Biden’s bumbling puts spotlight on abundance of elderly politicians running Washington
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