Joe's Staff Shuts Him Down Again

For the second time this week:

President Biden on Thursday was heard asking for permission from a staffer to “take a couple of questions” from the audience during a campaign stop in Michigan — prompting other aides to quickly move the press out of earshot.

“Can I take a couple questions?” Biden, 81, asked a female staffer as he met with supporters and campaign volunteers on the front porch of a Saginaw city council member’s home.

“Yeah, we’re going to take a few questions,” the staffer responded.

The staffer’s response apparently served as a signal to three other aides, who quickly began to herd up the reporters already positioned on the sidewalk about 20 feet away.

“Thank you, press … back in the vehicles,” they shouted, escorting the media away before Biden could take any questions.

It looks like the Post reporter saw the same possibility I entertained on Tuesday, that if Joe "asks for permission to take questions", he's really saying it's time to wrap things up and shoo the reporters away. I still think this presupposes subtlety and self-awareness that Joe simply doesn't have -- among other things, he's the sort of guy who thinks he's smarter than anyone else, and he believes if he gets to answer questions, he'll ace it.

Last month I looked at a very perceptive analysis and prescription from Nate Silver on the state of Joe's campaign. It looks like the handlers are at least aware of this, or Democrat donors are and have been pressing the handlers about it. For instance, Silver says,

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

Let’s abstract this for a moment. Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

Biden's appearances in New Hampahire Monday and Michigan yesterday might be characterized as quasi-IPAs, with Joe trotted out under highly controlled circumstances to be seen with small groups but not really to interact with them -- and when there's any sign that he's flagging, they're quickly wrapped up. This avoids the problem Silver notes that having Joe do more spontaneous events has risks that outweigh benefits, but a quasi-event that has to be wrapped up with a disingenuous signal that he's about to take questions has its own serious risks, especially if it happens over and over.

Let's think about what a president other than Joe might do -- a Nixon, say, either Bush, or a Clinton -- if his staff told him that there was too much risk of him saying something goofy if he took questions from the press or the public. My guess is such a president would take this to heart but work out a better signal that it was time to wrap things up. Rather than lie that he wanted to take questions, he could use a line more like, "I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed meeting with each of you today, but I'm told I have to take a security briefing. Maybe we can get back later."

My guess is that Joe's handlers simply can't have that discussion with him. Any suggestion that there's too much risk in letting him go off script at all would probably get him yelling and cussing them out, so they take his tentative offer to take questions as the sign to shut the whole thing down. For whatever reason, he doesn't cuss them out for that, at least so far. But I don't see how this can continue much longer without him either losing his temper in front of everyone or actually taking a question and bungling it badly.

In other words, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And we've started the national campaign for November, and it's only March.