WASHINGTON (AP) – No news conference. No oval office address. No primetime speech during a joint sitting of Congress.
President Joe Biden is the first manager in four decades to reach this point in his term without holding a formal question-and-answer session. It reflects a media strategy of the White House that was intended both to present important media statements for the celebration of a legislative victory and to limit unforced errors of a historically inclined politician.
Biden has chosen to ask questions about as often as most of his recent predecessors, but he tends to submit just one or two informal queries at a time, usually in a hurried environment at the end of an event.
In stark contrast to the previous government, the White House exercises extreme message discipline and empowers staff to speak, but does so with caution. The new White House team, reminiscent of both the largely leak-free campaign and the knotted Obama administration, carefully managed the president’s appearance and tried to lower the temperature of Washington in Donald Trump and to save a major media moment to mark which may soon be a signature achievement: passage of the COVID-19 bill.
The message control may serve the president’s purposes, but it denies the media opportunities to press Biden directly about important policy issues and to engage in the kind of back-and-forth that can extract information and thoughts that go beyond the compilations of The government.
“I think the president has lost an opportunity to speak to the country from the pulpit. The volume is turned so low in the Biden White House that they have to worry about someone listening, ”said Frank Sesno, former principal of George Washington University. ‘But he’s not great at these news conferences. He wanders. His strongest communication is not extraordinary. ”
Other modern presidents asked more questions during their opening days.
At this point, Trump and George HW Bush each held five press conferences, Bill Clinton four, George W. Bush three, Barack Obama two and Ronald Reagan one, according to a study by Martha Kumar, presidential expert and emeritus professor. at Towson University.
Biden conducted five interviews versus nine from Reagan and 23 from Obama.
‘Biden comes up with a plan for disseminating information. “If you compare him to Trump, Biden feels like you’re using a staff, that a president can’t do everything himself,” Kumar said. ‘Biden has a press secretary who gives regular briefings. He knows you can hold a news conference if you have something to say, especially a victory. They have an idea how to use this time, early in government when people pay attention, and how valuable it is. ‘
According to Kumar’s research, the new president asked 39 times questions, though usually only one or two inquiries were shouted from a group of reporters known as the press bath at the end of an event in the State Dining Room or Oval Office of the White House.
These exchanges can sometimes be awkward, with the cacophony of shouts or the rumble of the blades of the presidential helicopter lazing on the South lawn, making it difficult to have a meaningful exchange of words.
“Press conferences are critical to informing the American people and holding an administration accountable to the public,” said Associated Press Reporter Zeke Miller, president of the White House Correspondents Association. “As with previous presidents, the WHCA calls on President Biden to hold regular formal press conferences.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki defended the president’s media accessibility on Friday, suggesting a news conference was likely at the end of March.
“I would say that his focus is on recovery and relief for the American people, and he looks forward to continuing with you all and other members of the media who are not here today,” Psaki said. “And we look forward to letting you know as soon as the press conference is held.”
The assistants said the president’s first speech at a joint congressional hearing – not technically a state of the nation address, but a speech that usually has just as much splendor – is tentatively planned for the end of March. However, the format of the address is uncertain due to the pandemic.
The president achieved the highest marks for two important addresses, his inaugural address and his speech marking the 500,000th death to COVID-19.
Biden overcame a stutter in his childhood, and he has long talked to reporters and challenged requests from their assistants to ignore questions from the press. Biden, who was very long-suffering, tended to fork out during his long political career and occasionally struggled with remarks as president.
His use of the phrase “Neanderthal thinking” this week to describe the decision of the governors of Texas and Mississippi to lift mask mandates has dominated a new cycle and upset Republicans. This caused the form of distraction that his assistants tried to avoid and in a pandemic silver lining was largely able to evade during the campaign because the virus kept Biden at home for months and limited the potential for public error. has.
Biden captured his belief in press freedom and rebuked his predecessor’s offensive rhetoric towards the media, including Trump’s reference to reporters as ‘the enemy of the people’. Biden restored the daily press briefing, which became extinct under Trump, and opened a window on the operation of the White House. Its staff also broadcast on cable news to promote the COVID-19 bill.
And while Biden’s own Twitter account, in a sharp interruption of Trump’s social media habits, usually offers bad posts, his chief of staff Ron Klain has become a regular tweeter, using the platform to reinforce messages and criticize opponents.
The postponement of the news conference and joint speech also, symbolically, kept the first chapter of Biden’s presidency open and perhaps extended his honeymoon. In a poll released by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Inquiry, its approval rating was 60%.
Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University’s College of Communication, said Biden’s ‘rope-a-dope’ strategy is right now.
“Presidential press conferences are not high on the agenda for Americans concerned about COVID and the economic disaster that has hit so many families,” he said.
___
Lemire reports from New York.