Biden in Hidin’

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, January 19, 2022

 

President Joe Biden has announced his first formal press conference in months. We are all very curious about what exactly he is going to say — Biden most of all, I imagine.

 

Republicans are having a great deal of fun with Biden’s unreadiness to submit himself to the rigors of giving staged answers to predictable questions from a corps of mostly friendly and polite reporters. That’s fine — hoist on his own petard and all that — and the rhyme between Biden and hidin’ is difficult to resist. The limericks practically write themselves.

 

By the Republican Party’s calculation, Biden held only nine press conferences and 22 formal interviews in 2021, as compared to Donald Trump’s 22 press conferences and 92 interviews in 2017, and the gregarious Barack Obama’s 27 press conferences and 156 interviews in 2009. Bill Clinton, who enjoyed hearing himself speak almost as much as he enjoyed molesting White House interns, hit the world with 38 press conferences in Year One of his august administration.

 

At this time next year, Joe Biden will be on the far side of his 80th birthday, and even though he has never had a job that involved lifting anything heavier than money, he is no Mick Jagger — a 78-year-old man with a four-year-old child. He’s not even a Zhou Enlai — a man who was born in the 19th century and was still holding office when Biden was first elected to the Senate — or, moving slightly farther still to the left, 81-year-old Nancy Pelosi. While there is a lot of unseemly leering about Biden’s being a victim of late-life dementia, one thing that is undeniable is that he isn’t exactly what you’d call intellectually quick on his feet. But it’s anybody’s guess whether that has something to do with his age: He was as sharp as a doorknob — “His wit’s as thick as a Tewkesbury mustard” — when he was 40, too.

 

I do sometimes wonder why presidents, especially Republicans, speak to the press at all. I suppose I am glad that they do, to the modest extent that this contributes to transparency and accountability. But if I were — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — advising a President DeSantis or a President Ponnuru, I would advise them never to speak to the New York Times or the Washington Post, to CNN or NPR or the CBS Evening News with Whoever the Hell It Is These Days. What good could we expect to come of it? Everybody, including professional politicians, makes mistakes when speaking extemporaneously, even with the Wagnerian predictability of the typical American presidential interview. Everybody forgets things. Everybody has dull moments: It took me five guesses to solve a Wordle one day last week, and I misspelled Neiman Marcus in my newsletter — nobody is proud of that sort of thing.

 

Trump liked to talk to the Fox News gang quite a bit and to call into talk-radio shows, but, of course, his favorite medium was Twitter. For a more disciplined sort of president, that wouldn’t be a bad way to communicate at all: directly to the people, in your own words or those of some highly paid professional (the Peggy Noonan of the 21st century will be an author of tweets or something like that, not speeches) who can make sure that you say just what you want to say and nothing else. Of course, what most presidents want to say most of the time is approximately nothing, and a really good communications professional can help them do that effectively. There is an art to saying nothing — and if you are no good at it, you end up speaking like Kamala Harris and sounding ridiculous: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.” Hit the return key every seven words and that’d be postmodernist poetry.

 

Maybe Biden should take a page out of the Trump book and come up with some kind of one-way communication, not on Twitter but on a platform that would be more familiar to him, like a telegram — not the messaging service, but an actual telegram. I think that would suit him.

 

Instead, he is giving an old-fashioned press conference. What will he say? I am rapt with curiosity. He is too, I bet.