We need to see more Joe Biden. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

We need to see more Joe Biden

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 14 minutes

Joe Biden is, even compared to previous presidents, quite old. He has also held fewer press conferences and given fewer interviews than most presidents, while maintaining a relatively low-key roster of public events, and to the best of my understanding, he has fewer off-the-record chats with reporters and columnists than Barack Obama did.

One way to rebut concerns about his age would be to maintain a more vigorous schedule of unscripted events. I, personally, am not a big fan of press conferences and scrums (though the media generally loves them), but I think Biden would probably benefit from sitting for more interviews like the one he did last fall with John Harwood.

This is so obviously the right way to rebut concerns about Biden’s age, though, that some argue the fact that he hasn’t done it is even more damning evidence about his age. According to this view, his staff understands how damaging the low profile is, yet chooses to maintain it because they believe the consequences of the alternative would be even more dire.

I do think an important counterpoint to this is that zero information has leaked into the public domain suggesting that Biden is behind the scenes incapable of doing the job.

What you do hear is that Biden privately has a bad temper and yells and curses at staff during meetings when he’s fired up. This, I think, reflects both idiosyncratic aspects of his personality and also some generational shifts in what’s considered appropriate workplace conduct. I’ve been screamed at by Boomer managers over small mishaps, and I think it’s a genuinely bad habit of theirs. I would love to hear that Biden is unusually enlightened in this regard for a man of his age, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. But I do think it’s telling that many, many former senior members of the Trump administration will tell you that the man is unfit to serve, and nobody — including holdover Trump appointees like Mark Miller — says that about Biden.

So I want to offer an alternate theory of why we don’t see as much Unscripted Joe: His staff have an incorrect theory of American politics.

Before Robert Hur’s report kicked the age discourse into overdrive, Biden went to a fundraiser in New York City where he spoke unscripted with donors. What leaked out of that event wasn’t anything to do with Biden’s age or memory, it was Biden saying “I’m a practicing Catholic. I don’t want abortion on demand, but I thought Roe v. Wade was right.” And while this media controversy was lower-profile than the Hur report, I think it was more telling.

Biden’s “gaffe” is a classic old-fashioned abortion message.

When Roe v. Wade was decided, most Catholics were Democrats and the Catholic Church was strongly anti-abortion, but feminists also had more influence inside the Democratic Party coalition than within the GOP. The Roe decision kicked off a decades-long process of partisan sorting on abortion — one that left a lot of Catholic Dems in an awkward position. And many of them landed on the stance Biden articulated, that they agreed with church teaching as a matter of individual conscience, but as a question of secular public policy, they saw this as a matter of religious freedom and personal privacy.

As the United States has become dramatically more secular over the past 50 years, fewer and fewer people genuinely embrace this point of view.

Biden is a regular churchgoer. But my guess is that there are very few regular churchgoers on Biden’s staff, or working for his campaign, or working for other campaigns or Democratic Party super PACs or allied institutions. And that’s not just a question of feminist groups or reproductive rights groups. Realistically, there aren’t a lot of religious people working on the political operation at the Sierra Club or the AFL-CIO. Very few people working as political professionals today like that line Biden used or would praise it or echo it.

During an earlier iteration of this controversy, I had a pollster compare some of these messages. In a head-to-head matchup with an anti-abortion message, the version of the pro-choice message that signals personal opposition outperforms with all groups.

My view of the situation is that more unscripted Biden — not press scrums where reporters shout “aren’t you too old!?!” over and over again, but sit-down interviews or town halls where he can explain his views — would be a win-win. On the one hand, he would dispel concerns about his age. On the other hand, he would deliver a message that, precisely because he is an old white guy who goes to church, is better than the message his younger, better-educated, more secular staff comes up with.

But I don’t think Biden’s team agrees with that.

Slate ran an article about how Biden’s abortion message was a damaging gaffe.

Rebecca Traister, who previously described Biden’s response to Dobbs as “breathtakingly awful,” absolutely hated what Biden said at the fundraiser. And to be clear, that’s not some idiosyncratic take. As Anna North explained in 2019, there was a successful years-long effort by pro-choice groups to get Democrats to stop saying things like “safe, legal, and rare” because they prefer a message that does not express any moral qualms about abortion.

I myself do not have any religious qualms about abortion, or any personal objection to secular feminists making the case for safe, legal abortion on demand and without apology. That said, I do believe the following things:

    Abortion rights is probably Biden’s best issue in 2024, so he wants to drive up its salience.

    There are a good number of Black and Hispanic Democrats who are religious and anti-abortion. It would be good to drive up abortion’s salience in a way that does not usher them out of the coalition.

    Having stumbled upon the last churchgoing white Catholic Democrat in politics is an ideal way to combine these two points. 

But the prevailing wisdom in Democratic Party politics believes, I think, that I am wrong about this.

Despite the voluminous evidence to the contrary, we continue to see incredible levels of over-emphasis on turnout and mobilization. When Democratic operatives wring their hands about Biden’s Black support in 2024, they worry about the fact that African-American Democrats are to the left of white Democrats on Israel rather than that they are to the right of white Democrats on abortion. But just think about this for a moment. To the extent you want the United States to be more sympathetic to Palestinians, Joe Biden is clearly the right choice. To the extent that you want the United States to be more sympathetic to people with religious objections to abortion, it’s easy to see why you might be tempted to vote for Trump — or, if you find Trump objectionably racist, to stay home. To win the election, the important thing is to reassure people who are to Democrats’ right on key issues.

Again, though, this is not how Democrats are thinking about things.

And it’s not just abortion. All the reporting around the LNG exports issue makes it clear that the White House staff believes that appeasing climate groups is an important political priority for Biden, even though he’s already enacted the most important climate bill of all-time. This is a sincere difference of opinion about strategy that cuts across all age groups, and goes back to an odd moment in the 2020 campaign. Biden started out ahead in the polls but way behind in fundraising, with most of the “top” staffing talent going to other candidates. But then he won the primary, and right as he was wrapping it up, he fired his campaign manager and replaced him with Beto O’Rourke’s campaign manager. The new regime then launched a party unity process with Bernie Sanders that involved pivoting to the left for the general election campaign, which is not the typical way to run. He also selected as his VP someone who spent the whole primary attacking him from the left and who’s not from a swing state.

I mention all this not to criticize (though I do disagree with it), but to establish that we have a clear public record that it is Team Biden’s considered opinion that Joe Biden’s pre-2016 record in politics is cringe and bad and that they need to craft a different, more progressive persona for him. If you think that strategy is correct, then it follows that unscripted events are dangerous. Not because he might accidentally say Mexico when he clearly meant Egypt, but because he might accidentally say he has religious objections to abortion when he does, in fact, have religious objections to abortion.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, there was always this notion “Trumpism without Trump.”

And I think someone like J.D. Vance delivers on that. Vance’s issue-positioning aligns well with Trump’s, and he emphasizes culture war talking points, but he’s also an actual family man and not a walking scandal machine. Unlike Trump, he has some actual information about public policy and the discipline to learn things. He is, in other words, a real politician who is following down a trail that Trump illuminated. Trump himself has made it clear that as long as he is around, there will be no Trumpism without Trump, because to Trump, the only thing that matters is Trump. But conceptually, it makes sense.

The current administration, I think, is something like the opposite of that.

You have Joe Biden as president, but you do not have an administration that has been built around the idea of Bidenism. You see that in the anonymous staff letters protesting the administration’s Israel policy. Whether you agree with it or not, everything Biden has done on this topic is completely consistent with his longstanding record. But his team was not built entirely in his image.

Similarly, Karine Jean-Pierre was not prepared to back up Biden’s line on abortion from the podium with a forceful articulation of the difference between a question of public policy and a question of religious conscience. When the Biden administration approved the Willow project in Alaska, I offered a forceful defense of the decision, but the Biden administration did not because they believe — sincerely — that poking the activist bear would be counterproductive.

If you think it is true that the best strategy for Biden is to have a public message on every issue that has been workshopped with the groups, then I think it is probably true that he is not disciplined enough to do tons of unscripted speaking.

As you may recall, back in the early presidential primary debates, Biden attracted a lot of criticism by talking about the “word gap” and touting nurse home visits as a way to help disadvantaged kids. One gaffe aspect of that was he specifically mentioned “the record player” as his go-to source of recorded audio. But the real meat of the criticism is that he was answering a question about the legacy of slavery and didn’t talk about reparations or systemic racism or other contemporary progressive ideas. He instead talked — like Barack Obama did and as Bayard Rustin suggested — about broad race-neutral programs to uplift the underprivileged.

You could imagine a world in which, having won, Biden imposed that vision on his administration. He would have younger subordinates who don’t drop references to record players but who do echo the policy vision that Biden was articulating there.

In that world, it’s not just that we would see more of Biden at unscripted events. We would read social media posts that go out under Biden’s name that sound like the unscripted Biden. And talking points memos would go out to the various talking heads who show up on CNN and MSNBC, offering polished versions of the unscripted message. But that would have to be a world in which the Biden administration is comfortable saying there is a meaningful difference between the Joe Biden worldview and the Elizabeth Warren worldview, just as Trump does not shy away from the idea that there is a gap between him and some vague “Republican establishment.”