Biden’s first press conference as president should be easy, thanks to the right-wing media

What to expect from the long-awaited first conference of the 46th president

Biden (Copyright 2021 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

When President Joe Biden steps behind a presidential seal-adorned lectern for his first formal press conference today, he will do so under circumstances that are far more challenging than when his advisers announced the event just over a week ago. 

At the time, Biden and his young administration were riding high on currents of good news — the passage of his $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act and projections that Covid-19 vaccine distribution would soon surpass his goal of 100 million shots in his first 100 days. And in the minds of many Bidenworld heavyweights, the issue of Biden’s failure to hold a press conference earlier in his first term was an artificial one that was far more important to the beltway press and Republicans looking to damage him than most Americans.

Nine days later, the Biden team’s hopes that “shots in arms and money in pockets” would dominate the give-and-take at Thursday’s press conference have given way to plans to handle a glut of probing questions. Those present are expected to ask how the administration will handle a crush of unaccompanied children at the US-Mexico border, nearly 20 Americans dead from two mass shootings over the course of a week, and a legislative agenda that looks to be receiving the same amount of Republican support as anything proposed by Barack Obama during Biden’s time as vice president. 

White House sources were mum when asked how they thought Thursday’s session would end up going. But when it comes to managing expectations for the notoriously gaffe-prone septuagenarian — the oldest person to ever serve as president — top strategists and presidential communications experts say Biden’s team has had some unexpected help from Republicans and right-wing media figures. Such figures have kept the bar for his performance low with a constant stream of speculation about his fitness for office and whether he is even in charge in his own White House. 

One such Fox News personality, Tucker Carlson, suggested to one of his guests on Tuesday that the 46^th president is nothing more than a “marionette” who can be easily controlled by some shadowy boogeyman in the background, perhaps former President Obama or Vice President Kamala Harris. The guest responded with more speculation as to whether First Lady Dr Jill Biden was fulfilling the same role that Edith Wilson did after President Woodrow Wilson’s debilitating stroke in 1919.

Carlson’s colleague Laura Ingraham picked up the same thread later that evening when she said Biden “seems like a passive observer at best” and asked her guest — convicted felon and right-wing filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza — if there is “any real proof that Biden is actually making any of these decisions or even aware of what’s going on around him”.

Much of the right-wing narrative around Biden’s alleged infirmities stems from his tendency to pause or stumble over words, particularly when speaking extemporaneously. Those habits can be explained by the childhood stutter which he has spoken about on numerous occasions over the course of his public life. 

Adrienne Elrod, a veteran Democratic communications strategist who worked on the 2020 Democratic convention with the Biden campaign, said the rampant speculation over Biden’s brain will disappear after the press conference because he will have spoken far more coherently than any regular Fox News viewer would have predicted. She pointed to GOP attempts to cast Biden as a diminished figure who was being kept in his “basement” to prevent him from revealing his own cognitive decline during the campaign and former President Donald Trump’s frequent attacks on Biden’s mental acuity as examples of how Republicans successfully lowered expectations for him before his 2020 convention speech and the two 2020 general election debates.

“It’s just a silly line of attack… and it is going to backfire,” she said. “It has backfired before and it’s not going to work again.”

Joe Lockhart, who served as then-President Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1998 to 2000, also noted that Republicans’ previous attempts to cast Biden as somehow too infirm to serve as president failed spectacularly.

“First off, they are lowering expectations for him. Secondly, as a strategy, they fell 7 million votes short last time,” he said. 

Regardless of the low expectations being framed by Trump-friendly media, Lockhart said he expects Biden to be extremely well-prepared despite having never conducted a solo press conference at this level, thanks to his core team of top advisers.

“Biden has never prepared for or been prepared for a presidential press conference…but it’s not that dissimilar to [preparing for] a debate where you’re tossed questions, talked through strategy, the kind of thing that [White House Chief of Staff] Ron Klain is built for,” he said, noting that Klain has long been known in Democratic circles as somewhat of a “debate whisperer”.

“Ron Klain, Steve Richetti, Mike Donilon, Bruce Reed, they’ve been with him for a very long time, so they know him very well,” he added, rattling off a list of Biden’s inner circle.

Another Democratic strategy graybeard, Clinton campaign guru James Carville, agreed that the right is doing Biden a “big favor” by lowering expectations for him, but said Biden’s performance won’t matter to the vast majority of Republicans. Carville said Biden shouldn’t worry about how anything he says will play in far-right media because channels such as Fox News will run with “senility, the border, and cancel culture” no matter what, with a large helping of complaints about the questions Biden receives from the legitimate press.

“I guarantee you that they’ve already written the story and some fancy script on how the press was so easy on him,” he said. “They’ll make it into a loss, but their people are going to consider it one anyway.”

Carville added that Biden should have a simple response to any question about whether he is, in fact, running his own administration: “I think what he’s gonna say is: ‘I took office on January the 20^th… and we’ve passed the largest and one of the most significant piece of legislation in an American history. Families have been struggling with Covid and businesses have been struggling and schools have been struggling. And now they’re getting some help, so I think somebody is in charge’.”