Biden’s victory seems to have reinforced the belief that what worked in the campaign will work in the West Wing. Citing the pandemic, he largely stuck to his home in Delaware while Trump raced around the country leading marathon rallies. As president, Biden is following a pattern he set during the campaign. Over the same period last year, Trump had spoken nearly three times as many words and been on camera nearly three times as much. “No Trump voter will listen to Joe Biden, just as no Biden voter would listen to Donald Trump.”Īs of last week, Biden had publicly spoken about 116,000 words and spent 12 hours on camera as president, Bill Frischling, the founder of, a data-analytics firm, told me. “The problem is, you’re talking to the choir,” he said. His message is getting out, and it’s getting out relatively unedited and uncriticized.” Luntz added that the audience for a presidential news conference these days is shrunken and fractured. “A press conference will not help him and can only hurt him,” he said. Were he advising the White House, Luntz said, he’d recommend delaying the news conference even longer, perhaps holding one at the 100-day mark. Read: Biden just showed us what he really values But they’re happy not to see him every day.” “People are happy to see Joe Biden when they see him. “People aren’t beating down the door and saying, ‘Why isn’t he in my living room every day? Why am I not seeing that big face staring at me and promoting himself in some way?’” Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster, told me. Biden has no wish to resurrect Donald Trump’s in-your-face presidency. After all, Americans just had a president who entered their life and refused to leave, who gripped the megaphone and wouldn’t let go. It’s a conscious calculation that people don’t need-or want-to hear from the president on an hour-by-hour basis, that they will be satisfied if he can revive the economy and end the pandemic. Limiting his exposure to the press and, by extension, the public isn’t simply a defensive ploy to avoid an embarrassing gaffe. Overlooked is that Biden and his team are also making a strategic bet. “The problem occasionally is I say all that I mean.” “Now look, I realize no one ever doubts I mean what I say,” he told an audience in 2015. Parrying questions on live television is a skill that tests even the most disciplined speaker, which Biden is not. “He’s not that quick on his feet,” Frank Luntz, the longtime pollster, told me. The most popular theory is that Biden aides feared that a president who’s at times too loquacious for his own good might flub an answer. Which led to a lot of speculation about why Biden was so reluctant to meet with the press en masse. Reporters were quizzing Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, at her daily briefings. Pressure for Biden to conduct his first news conference had been mounting for weeks. Biden’s debut comes tomorrow-65 days into his presidency-when he’ll appear in the East Room before a press corps who will ask questions, squeeze in follow-up questions, and, in rising desperation as the spectacle winds down, shout questions unbidden. Bush, Bill Clinton-every president since Calvin Coolidge had given a news conference by a comparable point in his term.
What he has yet to do is hold a formal news conference. He gives interviews and takes questions from time to time as he moves through his calendar. Barely a week passes when he doesn’t tour a factory or host a meeting in the Oval Office. 2.īiden's approval numbers have consistently fallen since the summer as Democrats on Capitol Hill have struggled to find the votes to pass his social spending bill and voting rights legislation - measures he spent much of his first year in office trying to push through Congress.Joe Biden is hardly in hiding.
#BIDEN PRESS CONFERENCE TODAY FULL#
It was the first time Biden had formally taken questions from the full White House press corps since the climate summit in Scotland on Nov.
He said he will continue to take steps to get the pandemic under control, including more widespread testing, and he urged the Federal Reserve to address inflation. and efforts to keep schools and businesses open. In just his second domestic news conference as president, Biden touted his first-year accomplishments, including economic growth, the vaccinations of 200 million people in the U.S.
"Did you ever think that one man out of office could intimidate an entire party where they're unwilling to take any vote, contrary to what he thinks should be taken, for fear of being defeated in a primary?" Biden asked.
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