Joe Biden’s People Are All Out of Excuses

W ould you believe that Joe Biden’s conspicuously low profile isn’t just a deft political maneuver but also a display of high-minded statesmanship? That’s what the president’s team apparently wants you to believe.

“President Joe Biden is going small to try to win big in November,” the Associated Press’s Zeke Miller opened his report outlining why Biden is trading big vote-mobilizing rallies for “minimalist events.” No longer will the president seek to maximize his exposure to the most American eyeballs. Instead, he’ll lean “into his strength as a retail politician” by making surprise visits to barbershops, burger joints, and boba-tea retailers in the hopes that those appearances generate organic traction on social-media outlets such as TikTok and Instagram.

In his remarks to the AP, the president’s deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, tried to put a brave face on their predicament. “I would rather have 100 outside voices saying Joe Biden is great than one piece of content from us saying Joe Biden is great,” he said of the campaign’s earned-media strategy. That would be defensible if the president were ever on the receiving end of that sort of entropic gratitude — particularly among the younger demographics most likely to populate social media with content. That approach also assumes that those voters are going to give Biden rave reviews for chatting up a rope line while he languidly consumes his umpteenth ice-cream cone. The premise is laughable.

Hope is not a strategy, so we cannot attribute the president’s minimalism to strategic insight. Rather, his campaign team is making do with what they’ve got, and what they’ve got is a candidate they do not trust.

You can’t blame Biden’s team for making the best of a bad situation, though you can fault the press for uncritically disseminating the unconvincing explanations for Biden’s modest public profile.

Take, for example, the president’s decision to eschew for the second year in a row the traditional pre-game interview with the network broadcasting the Super Bowl. Last year, the White House blamed Fox for Biden’s reluctance. It claimed that the president didn’t want to elevate a network that is, as the New York Times put it, “home to Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity,” adding that the Fox Corporation was not amenable to alternative interviews with affiliate outlets such as Fox Sports or Fox Soul.

Okay, so what’s the problem with CBS, which will play host to this year’s Super Bowl? Well, would you believe that the White House was frustrated because the network didn’t offer Biden enough airtime? That’s what a member the president’s team told News Nation’s Kellie Meyer, complaining that “Only 3-4 minutes of [the interview] would have actually aired during the Super Bowl coverage.”

If that doesn’t do it for you, maybe you’d buy the notion that Biden didn’t want to detract from the athletic spectacle to which Americans are treated on Super Bowl Sunday. “Biden’s aides believe many voters — already exhausted from a bruising political season — simply want to tune into the game,” an NBC News report read. “And that seeing the president pop up while waiting for kickoff might turn them off.” When your own campaign team has convinced itself that the best defense of their candidate’s conduct is to tell reporters that voters just can’t stand the sight of him, you have deeper problems than the ones to which you’re admitting.

These literally unbelievable excuses for Biden’s fear of the spotlight reached a crescendo on Monday night. Speaking with Politico reporters, the president’s aides insisted that Biden has declined to speak directly to the American people about the ongoing U.S.-led military campaigns designed to chasten Iran and its proxies amid a series of attacks that are now killing Americans out of a profound magnanimity. To rub America’s might in Iran’s face would risk a backlash, Biden’s advisers told Politico. “He’s been driven by concerns that delivering a major speech could escalate tensions with Iran and spark a larger regional conflict,” their White House sources maintained.

The most generous interpretation of these remarks is that they are merely delusional. The notion that nations commit themselves to courses of action as weighty as risking direct conflict with other nations based on something as flimsy as a speech is bizarre. The idea that a speech informing the public of the rationale behind retaliatory strikes on Iranian proxies would be somehow more provocative than the strikes themselves is insane. Such a speech would be a conventional way of drumming up support for a sustained campaign against Iranian aggression. Only if you have no interest in prosecuting that campaign — which Joe Biden does not — would you forego that opportunity. The White House’s decision to once again broadcast Biden’s pathological fear of escalation in the region only communicates to Iran that the president’s tolerance for deadly provocations abroad has not yet been expended.

And that’s just if we take Biden’s excuse-making at face value. Given the degree to which the president’s refusal to address the nation is of a piece with the bunker mentality that has overtaken his campaign, what rational observer would give Biden’s team that benefit of the doubt? We’re left to conclude that Biden and his courtiers are either deluded or duplicitous, with the latter more likely.

It is patently obvious today that Joe Biden and his handlers are terrified of providing the public with opportunities to give the president a prolonged once-over. Their efforts to explain the rationale for Biden’s semi-visibility were already strained months ago. Today, they read like insults to voters’ collective intelligence. The president just isn’t up to this aspect of the job, and Americans have noticed. The attempt to make Biden’s incapacity into everyone else’s problem is only going to deepen the voters’ growing apprehension over their enfeebled president.