"Am I Allowed To Take Any Questions? Anybody Here?"

BIDEN: "Am I allowed to take any questions? Anybody here?"

Biden's handlers IMMEDIATELY kick the press out of the room and end the feed. pic.twitter.com/VgIyewvQNz

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 11, 2024

Joe was at a New Hampshire rally yesterday and created a remarkable vignette: at the end of his remarks, he asked, "Am I allowed to take questions? Anybody here, the staff?" By several accounts, his handlers immediately cut the feed, replaced it with a test pattern, visible in the clip above, and chased the reporters from the room.

I briefly wondered if this wasn't as spontaneous as it seemed, and maybe it was some sort of pre-arranged code word from Joe to his handlers that it was time in fact to wrap things up -- that might have been a slightly better take on what happened, but only slightly. I watched it again, and Joe seemed very much at loose ends, the audience giggled nervously before an awkward pause, and then the handlers cut the feed. This wasn't scripted.

As Nick Arama commented on Red State, "The leader of the free world, and he appears to be run by unnamed staffers and people behind the scenes."

Well, let's face it, this happens all the time. The New York Post covered an episode in a 2023 book by Franklin Foer when Joe made an off-the-cuff remark that appeared to call for an uprising against Vladimir Putin:

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.“

The statement alarmed Americans and international US allies who worried it would spark retaliation and escalation from Putin — and his full arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Upon leaving the stage, “Biden instantly knew that the White House would have to clarify his mistake,” according to Foer.

No stranger to walking back comments made by the president, Biden’s staff quickly took the initiative to explain away the controversial statement. But they’d done so without consulting the president, which drew the octogenarian’s ire and resentment, according to the book.

. . . Deep down, he “knew that he had erred” by making the comment in the first place, Foer says. But instead of taking responsibility for the flub, he “resented his aides for creating the impression that they had cleaned up his mess.”

“Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler,” Foer writes.

What strikes me about Monday's New Hampshire episode isn't so much that it happened, although it's clearly part of an ongoing problem for Joe as a candidate. The problem is that it took place because the 2024 national campaign has opened in March, instead of after the party conventions in the summer, and this is because the Republicans ended their primary season almost as soon as it started -- just after Super Tuesday, Trump's last Republican challenger dropped out, and Trump began to run against Biden in earnest.

The typical indicators that a Democrat campaign has visibly faltered, like Michael Dukakis's tank ride in September 1988 or John Kerry's windsurfing frolic in September 2004, have taken place during the conventional fall campaigns, and I've noted here that the loyalists who start to post alarms that such campaigns aren't doing well usually begin in the summer and fall. In Biden's case, they've been doing this since last year, and just on Sunday I noted that Denmocrat insiders are demanding "passion and fire out in public" from the big guy.

The problem is that this is March, not September. They seem to have him doing rallies nearly every day, sometimes more than one a day, since the State of the Union, when this sort of thing has never been Joe's strong point -- he does things like dodge his handlers and run off to chat up some pre-teen girl whenever he can manage to do it, and the out-in-public strategy does nothing but create endless opportunities for hair sniffing, MILF groping, gaffes, and malapropisms.

But his handlers can't even keep him to a script. He wanders off the text, inserts new wording, slurs his words, and reverts to vacant pauses -- with month after extra month of an already-begun national campaign. Do Joes' handlers seriously expect to keep up the schedule they seem to be setting for him through November? And this simply leaves aside the accounts of people like Robert Hur of how he acts behind closed doors -- just this morning:

Joe Biden literally said "My Corvette go BRRRRR" while Robert Hur pleaded with him to answer actual questions pic.twitter.com/7dSk53VG3Y

— Dylan Housman (@Dylan_Housman) March 12, 2024

Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.