The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Translating news from ‘Good Enough President’
Despite the dramatic change in leadership, it appears presidential press conferences will still not be relaxing affairs.
We have endured four years of insane press conferences at which Donald Trump berated and belittled the reporters he called on, suggested Americans try “health” procedures that could kill them and boasted about his “very large, ah, brain.”
President Joe Biden on Thursday was an improvement. But how much of a statement is that? Watching the president make his way through an hour with the press corps was a different kind of cringe theater.
On the plus side, Biden was almost courtly in his treatment on reporters, even apologizing when an answer ran a little bit long. He did not address anyone by ethnicity. (Trump once called a Kurdish journalist “Mr. Kurd.”) He did not ask a Black reporter to schedule a meeting for him with Black members of Congress. (Trump did that.)
Biden’s lifelong battle with stuttering often causes him to speak in un-diagrammable sentences or to stop in mid-thought and then launch into a completely new subject and verb.
It is often easier to figure out the point he’s making than it is to quote him verbatim. On Thursday, for example, I’m fairly confident that Biden’s main thoughts about the filibuster were (a) he thinks they should go back to making senators run their mouths until they collapse instead of just having an aide send an email invoking cloture (b) he thinks he can get a lot of stuff passed without abolition of the filibuster and he’d like the chance to try (c) but if things get ridiculous he’d consider radical reform.
Those are his thoughts. Whether he actually said them is a separate question. It’s sort of there in quotes like this: “And so I’m going to say something outrageous. I’ve never been particularly poor at calculating how to get things done in the United States Senate. So the best way to get something done, if you hold near and dear to you that you like to be able to ... Anyway, we’re ready to get a lot done. And if we have to, if there’s complete lockdown and chaos as a consequence of the filibuster, then we’ll have to go beyond what I’m talking about.”
I don’t mind telling you that my heart stopped with that awkward pause followed by “anyway.” I also don’t mind telling you that I was rooting for Biden, not so much on a partisan basis as out of a desire to have a functioning president. It would make a nice change.
It’s no secret that Biden and his team see this format as straight shot to his glass jaw. He treated this news conference the way a lot of people treat colonoscopies — an analogy that works on more than one level.
It’s no secret that Biden and his team see this format as straight shot to his glass jaw. He treated this news conference the way a lot of people treat colonoscopies — an analogy that works on more than one level.
Oddly, his biggest challenge seemed to be calling on reporters, which Biden did from a list at the podium, like those people who have to stare at the Cheesecake Factory menu for agonizing intervals before asking the waiter, “Is there ... a lot of sweet potato ... in the sweet potato enchiladas?”
Trump, of course, solved this problem by pointing and saying, “You! Mr. Stupid from the Failing Whatever.”
Biden answered a question about the North Korean missile test without ever looking up from the podium. He clearly had orders from the staff: no freelancing, no gaffes. I found that a little depressing, but I concede: this is an improvement over the last guy, whose stated North Korea strategy was, “You think you’re crazy? You want to see crazy? I’ll show you crazy. Go ahead, try and incinerate us.”
Biden is sort of the Good Enough President. In the 1950s, the British pediatrician and psychotherapist Donald Winnicott pioneered the idea that a mother should taper off meeting all the needs of her very young child so that the infant would begin developing tools to cope with life’s inevitable frustrations. Better, healthier, wrote Winnicott, to be the Good Enough Mother than the perfect one.
There is colonoscopic blame to be shared. The White House press corps is pathetic. Two different reporters pressed Biden on whether he’ll run again in 2024 and, if so, whether he would keep Vice President Kamala Harris as his running mate. What’s he supposed to say?
Reporters asked him questions about the border crisis, and when he answered those questions, other reporters asked him nearly identical questions as if they had not heard the first ones.
To quote the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, “Their failure to ask about the pandemic, the recession, anti-Asian violence, climate change or even infrastructure (Biden had to bring it up himself) was nothing short of irresponsible.”
In the main, Biden was purposeful and refreshingly humble. He talked of presidents “better than me” and said was “hired to solve problems,” as if he had pulled up to the White House in a panel truck.
There are worse flaws than disfluencies of speech. The most silvertongued, verbally adroit politician I ever saw in a long life of covering these people was Bill Clinton. Nobody even close.
Like I said, there are worse flaws.