Biden’s first presser: The reviews are in
President Biden’s press conference last week “shows why he waited” 65 days to have one, said Matt Lewis in The DailyBeast.com. After Biden avoided formal questions from the White House press corps for longer than any president since Calvin Coolidge, his debut presser “wasn’t pretty.” When not reading from his notes, Biden was “shaky” and “sometimes incoherent.” Asked about Georgia’s new voting restrictions, Biden ad-libbed a memorable head scratcher: “This makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.” But despite Biden’s rambling, “he did nothing that would undermine his reputation as a decent, likable, moderate, commonsensical guy.” President Trump’s pressers were must-see TV, said Susan Glasser in NewYorker.com—you never knew when he might suggest bleach could cure Covid, or devolve into “cartoonish demagoguery.” Freed from this “Trumpian chaos,” reporters fired “faux-gotcha questions” at Biden about immigration and the filibuster, while failing, indefensibly, to ask a single question about the pandemic.
The White House press corps loved to grandstand when challenging Trump on the facts, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. But as Biden babbled untruth after untruth, “a room full of 30 supposed journalists” let him get away with it. When Biden claimed that the current surge of migrants at the border “happens every single, solitary year,” no one pointed out that the numbers are the highest in 20 years. Reporters mainly wanted to know why he wasn’t moving faster on his radical agenda. Often, when Biden heard the topic of a question, said Scott Jennings in CNN.com, he’d start riffling through his stack of “policy note cards.” Attempts to speak off script devolved into a “word salad.” All in all, it was “boring.”
“Boring” is just what this country needs after Trump, said Gary Abernathy in WashingtonPost .com. Biden stayed on message, explaining his goals for a massive infrastructure bill, detailing how U.S.-China competition is a choice between “autocracy or democracy,” and handling repeated questions about re-election (“My plan is to run”). But for many viewers, substance was secondary. They wanted to see if Biden is the doddering, senile 78-year-old that right-wing media make him out to be. Clearly, Biden is “a step slower” mentally than he once was, but Fox News viewers were probably surprised to witness a fully capable president answering questions for an hour.