What Do Biden’s Press Conferences Reveal?

Opinion

June 18th, 3:17am

Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein -

We can retire the idea that President Joe Biden doesn’t do press conferences. With one more overseas on Wednesday, Biden has now done four solo news conferences, already matching George W. Bush’s first year and three ahead of Donald Trump in 2017; if he keeps up the pace, he’ll be mid-pack on that score for presidents from Richard Nixon on. It’s still early, and it’s not unusual for presidents to take some time to figure out which formats work for them. Trump shied away from solo press conferences until his final year, but did a lot of joint ones with foreign leaders and took plenty of questions in other formats. Biden has only held two joint news conferences, with the pandemic cutting off normal diplomatic travel at first, but I expect he’ll gravitate more to such events going forward. I’m happy to see the formal solo conference survive after Trump almost abandoned it in his first three years (averaging just three a year). It will never thrive again the way it did when the broadcast networks dominated, but it can still be quite revealing. Remember, all presidents do these things — one-on-one interviews, quick hits with local stations, call-ins to talk TV and radio, formal press conferences, informal sessions with the White House press corps — because it serves their purposes. It’s part of representation, as they explain to voters what they’ve been doing in the context of their campaign promises. It’s part of electioneering for those presidents seeking (or at least potentially seeking) another term. It’s also a way to negotiate; there are times when it’s useful for the president to make his or her positions public, thereby making them harder to walk away from. And press conferences give presidents an opportunity to direct attention to programs or organizations or people, meaning that they create opportunities to offer something valuable. Biden handles all of this … adequately. He’s more articulate than either Bush; more in control of facts than Ronald Reagan; able to speak directly to regular voters better than Jimmy Carter or, in this format, Barack Obama, who never really found a way to make formal news conferences work for him. Like most of his predecessors, Biden is an experienced politician who knows how to duck questions he doesn’t want to answer and transition to topics he’d prefer to talk about. That’s the good side. Biden also can seem old (which isn’t surprising, given his age); he’s fine on substance, but he does search for words often enough that it’s noticeable, and his apparent energy level isn’t consistent. And he’s apt to lose his cool if he thinks a question is foolish, as happened Wednesday. Leaving aside Trump’s tantrums, Biden on this score is probably most comparable to Harry Truman; it didn’t help Truman, and it doesn’t help Biden. That said, Biden also apologized a while later to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, which is also something unusual about him — he is, perhaps uniquely among presidents, an apologizer. Sometimes he takes it to silly extremes, as he did during debates last year when he more than once apologized for going over his time limit, something virtually every candidate does and virtually none of them are sorry about. I don’t know that it’s especially important, but I do think it’s refreshing to have a president who’s able to say he’s sorry about things. Bloomberg

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