We know President Biden doesn’t perform well in sit-down interviews; if he was good at them, he would do them all the time. His 60 Minutes interview was his first on-camera sit-down interview in 208 days, since his interview on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night program. That was 118 days after his sit-down with Lester Holt of NBC News.
I think it’s revealing how quickly Biden gets prickly and irritated at the slightest pushback:
SCOTT PELLEY: Mr. President, as you know, last Tuesday the annual inflation rate came in at 8.3 percent. The stock market nosedived. People are shocked by their grocery bills. What can you do better and faster?
BIDEN: Well, first of all, let’s put this in perspective. Inflation rate month to month was just — just an inch, hardly at all,
PELLEY: You’re not arguing that 8.3 percent is good news.
BIDEN: No, I’m not saying it is good news. But it was 8.2 percent or — 8.2 percent before. I mean, it’s not — you’re ac — we act — make it sound like all of a sudden, “My God, it went to 8.2 percent.” It’s been –
PELLEY: It’s the highest inflation rate, Mr. President in 40 years.
BIDEN: I got that. But guess what we are. We’re in a position where, for the last several months, it hasn’t spiked. It has just barely — it’s been basically even. And in the meantime, we created all these jobs and — and prices — have — have gone up, but they’ve come down for energy. The fact is that we’ve created 10 million new jobs.
Just about every Biden sit-down interview features something like this — “that was four or five days ago, man!” or “you’re being a wise guy!” And that’s not getting into Biden’s irritation with the press in non sit-down interviews — “what a stupid son of a bitch!” “Read the polls, Jack! You guys are all the same!”
Biden represented Delaware in the Senate from 1973 to 2009, and at the risk of offending everyone who worked in Delaware political media during those years, I don’t think Biden was subject to the toughest scrutiny or the hardest questions while he was senator. When Biden stepped into the national arena with his presidential races in 1988 and 2008, Biden fell flat on his face with some train-wreck answers and cringe-inducing exchanges with voters. Profiles of Biden in the national press, even from expectedly friendly sources like the New Republic, pointed out, “he’s also legendary for speaking impulsively and leaving others to clean up the mess.” Back in 2008, Politico wrote that during the Reagan years, Biden “started to fashion a reputation — a somewhat unfair one, the Washington consensus seems to be these days — as a clownish figure. He was sometimes dismissed as a not-so-bright windbag.”
Biden was a big fish in the small pond of Delaware. But when he was on a debate stage, standing next to the better-known and sharper knives of his party, he looked like that clownish, not-so-bright figure.
Eight years as vice president gave Biden more practice in dealing with the spotlight, and no doubt Biden emerged from the Obama years with an elder statesman status in Democratic circles. But he also got older. As John Ellis put it last summer:
Somewhere along the way of the last few years, Biden transitioned from “young old” to “old.” Veteran reporters describe the transition in code. “He’s lost a step or two.” Or: “he’s lost something off his fastball.”
Biden is used to softballs, and people not calling him out when he says something that isn’t accurate or plausible. If Democrats do decide to use Biden on the campaign trail over the next six weeks or so, he probably won’t be doing a lot of interviews.