Q: Should you have taken those steps sooner before parents got to these shelves and couldn’t find formula?
President Biden: If we’d been better mind readers, I guess we could have. But we moved as quickly as the problem became apparent to us, and we have to move with caution as well as speed.
But President Biden and his team didn’t need to be mind-readers, they just needed to be news readers. The Wall Street Journal had a prominently-featured in-depth article on January 12, 2022:
Baby formula has been hard to find in many parts of the U.S. for months, sending parents searching for Enfamil, Similac, Gerber and other brands.
Retailers and formula makers agree that out-of-stocks are a problem. They don’t agree on how severe it is and who is to blame. Chains like Walmart Inc., nd CVS Health Corp. say the manufacturers are having supply issues; formula makers say retailers aren’t getting product to stores once it is delivered.
“The shelves are just bare,” said Derval Kenny, 65, of Rye, N.Y., who has been trying to help find Similac formula for two infant grandsons who live in Connecticut and New Jersey. “To me, there should be an uproar.”
Note that news story was more than a month before the Abbott Laboratories recall. The recall exacerbated the problem, but it did not create the problem.
Scoffing that only a mind-reader — my inner sci-fi nerd is screaming that Biden meant clairvoyance, not telepathy — could have foreseen this worsening crisis is part of a continuing pattern for this president. It’s not just that Biden blows off the legitimate point of his administration being slow to act (again), it’s that he does it in such a snotty way. Biden genuinely seems to think that only someone unreasonable could possibly doubt the performance of this White House — under a president who boasted his team had solved the supply-chain crisis in December — “the much-predicted crisis didn’t occur. Packages are moving. Gifts are being delivered. Shelves are not empty.”
My first reaction was, “I can’t believe they’re going with the ‘we’re not mind readers’ spin,” but this may not be an organized and deliberate White House messaging effort. This may well be that familiar irritable grandpa, speaking off the cuff, irked that someone is suggesting he dropped the ball again, and insisting everyone else’s expectations are unreasonable.