President Biden must set the tone

AP/PTI file

Trigger warning. 

The 2024 presidential election is 306 days away. The nation’s political reporters have been busy lathering up anonymous sources to harvest their quotes and titillate the Washington, DC, political establishment with panic porn. 

Panic is an unbecoming quality, and waves of it are cascading across Washington, DC, as a hundred blind quotes reveal how the hapless Biden campaign remains lost, adrift, clueless and losing. 

Here is how Steve Peoples, one of America’s most clueless, dishonest and incompetent political reporters, summed up the president’s political standing in an Associated Press story that will be read in newspapers all across America and around the world. Here is the gist. Remember, this is reported without attribution and asserted as fact:

One of the few certainties at this point is that Biden is a virtual lock to be the Democratic nominee again, facing only token opposition in this year’s primary despite overwhelming concerns within his own party about his physical and mental fitness.

What do you think? Is he making it up? Or is it an accurate account of what every single Democratic leader talks about when the reporters let them talk off the record? Does he have any evidence to back up the statement? Can he name 20 people? What about ten? Five? 

This is what garbage journalism looks like, and the White House campaign team best wake up yesterday about the nature of the fight that they are in.

Here is another weak story that assaulted President Biden to begin the new year from Reuters. Let me set it up for you.

President Biden is speaking extemporaneously at his fundraising events. He is apparently laying into Trump, and talking candidly about a number of issues honestly, authentically and politically. The White House and campaign teams allowed reporters into the fundraising event, and the result was a story that sought to make an issue of the delta between what he says at a political event and what he says at a government event at which the president conducts his duties. Incredibly, the Reuters story picks up on Biden’s use of the word “indiscriminate“ and scandalizes it.

Here is an excerpt from the stupidity:

Biden's open-mic disclosures are clashing with the White House system built to keep him on script.

The comments sometimes baffle, rankle, or worry his aides, who are forced to explain or contradict them later.

They often struggle to shift attention back to the administration's message of the day, or explain why Biden's comments are seemingly at odds with official U.S. policy.

As Biden himself has acknowledged, his candor can sometimes cause problems. "No one ever doubts I mean what I say," Biden told donors last year. "The problem is I sometimes say all that I mean."

The White House and the Biden re-election campaign declined to comment.

The most incredible part of the story that proves the point that no good deed goes unpunished is at the bottom of the Reuters story. Wait for it…

While a small pool of reporters traditionally follow U.S. presidents around in public, recording their every utterance or stumble, whether or not to allow press to these closed-door events is a matter of personal choice.

Trump has barred reporters from similar events.

The Biden campaign should appreciate a few things. 

First, whomever built the White House system to keep him “on script” should be fired because it’s not working, and it is helping to elect Trump. 

Second, the way this works is that the president sets the tone. The staff gets in line behind him and his message, not the other way around. 

Third, the decision to allow the reporters to remain in the room is as profoundly stupid as picking up a rattlesnake to kiss it. In fact, it is political malfeasance. Shut out the press, lock the door and don’t look back. The notion that the White House press corps carries some type of moral imprimatur, or has any standing with the public, is an absurdity. The American people deeply appreciate the absolute corruption of the overwhelming majority of media companies and understand their business is public arson, not the public trust. They are in the billion-dollar clickbait game and should be treated as such. The only thing that matters is winning. 

Speaking of winning, first, there are questions that President Biden must answer:

1. Why are you running for president at age 81 against Donald Trump? 

2. Why do you want four more years? To do what? 

Whatever the answers may be, it had better be constructed around the concept of BETTER — as in better than Trumpism. Hope defeats anger. 

Second, elections are about the future, not the past.  Does anyone on the campaign team understand what happened to Winston Churchill after World War II was won? 

The idea that President Biden will be elected for a second term because of what he achieved in the first is absurd. Politics does not function like this in America — or really anywhere. I’ll make it simple. The people are extremely ungrateful, and they have short attention spans. They don’t like thanking politicians for doing what they said they would do. The Biden team should quickly come around on this. The White House, Marine One, Airforce One, “Hail to the Chief,” 21 gun salutes, Camp David and the Marine Band are the thanks. That’s it. The country is in a generally angry state of mind, and less neediness would be appropriate. 

America is a nation in the midst of a deepening and worsening political crisis. The foundational concept of the nation is under direct assault. The proposition that election winners should hold power in America is under attack by a powerful combination of forces that pose a profound danger to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of every American. Donald Trump is the leader of those forces, and they are energized, confident and motivated by their chance to take power again. The results will be a catastrophe for the nation — and the world — should they succeed. 

Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post associate editor and columnist, is one of the best and most ethical journalists left in a shattered business. She wrote a brilliant piece the other day laying out this moment. I agree with every word, with one slight caveat: elections don’t tell us who we are. They decide who we will become. 

Who will we become? 

There are many answers to that question, but I’ll close with this thought. Democracy doesn’t seem to mean much to the 40 percent of the country that doesn’t have $400 cash available for an emergency. They don’t have many choices or freedoms. The farmers in Solano County didn’t have a lot of freedom and choices when Silicon Valley royalty decreed they would build a new utopia where generations had worked the land. Joe Biden shouldn’t fight over a word, but rather the American way of life. It is time to rebuild it and that work must be done forcefully and fearlessly. 

A great and worthy fight for America lies ahead. Losing is not an option. Panic is not an option. Despair is not an option. Neither is delusion, wish-casting or staying in line to please Biden’s political staff, which is capable, but presently failing. 

There is no way around the question at hand: how do you beat Trump? He needs to be knocked on his ass like he was in 2020. There is no such thing as too tough or too much when it comes to defining the most dangerous American who has ever lived. We are in a moment where there are new storms gathering because our shared memory of old ones has faded. Fight back. 

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