On the menu today: No, it’s not the biggest deal in the world to hear that President Biden now uses notecards when giving remarks and answering questions at his closed-door, high-dollar campaign fundraisers. But considering how rarely the American public gets to hear Biden give off-the-cuff, unscripted remarks of any length and substance in any other venue, it’s an indication that Biden really is notecard- and teleprompter-dependent now. This means the usual advice that the president needs to get out there, interact with voters more, and make the case for himself and his policies is akin to asking him to demonstrate gymnastics or run a marathon. The guy just can’t do it anymore. And the White House would have you believe that he can keep going at it for another four to five years or so.
What We Get to Hear from President Biden
President Biden has been using notecards in closed-door fundraisers, calling on prescreened donors and then consulting his notes to provide detailed answers, according to people familiar with the routine. . . .
Biden’s reliance on notecards to help explain his own policy positions — on questions he knows are coming — is raising concerns among some donors about Biden’s age.
Biden’s last press conference was the prime-time one in which he insisted his memory was fine, followed by several assertions that were false or erroneous:
- Biden said, “The evidence said I did not willfully retain these documents.” Hur’s report, page one: “Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”
- Biden said, “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that. Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.” NBC News reported, “Hur never asked that question, according to two people familiar with Hur’s five-hour interview with the president over two days last October. It was the president, not Hur or his team, who first introduced Beau Biden’s death, they said.”
- Biden said, “I’m of the view, as you know, that the conduct of the response in Gaza — in the Gaza Strip has been over the top. I think that — as you know, initially, the President of Mexico, El-Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in.” Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is the president of Egypt.
That was February 8. Since then, Biden hasn’t done any sit-down interviews with any media organizations. He also hasn’t had any formal press conferences, although he has held a few “press gaggles,” short exchanges with reporters — often very short — on his way to the Marine One helicopter or to church.
On February 17, a reporter asked about the death of Alexsei Navalny, and Biden replied, presumably referring to Vladimir Putin, “I said we’d — there would be a price to pay. He is paying a price already. Since 2000 when I made that statement, Russians have had sanctions imposed on them and a whole range of other impacts.”
On February 19, Biden said he would not contend “that Aleksey Navalny’s blood is on the hands of House Republicans right now,” but that, “Look, the way they’re walking away from the threat of Russia, the way they’re walking away from NATO, the way they’re walking away from meeting our obligations, it’s just shocking. I mean, they’re wild. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Oftentimes, like on February 20, the information exchanged is less than illuminating:
Q Mr. President, good afternoon, sir. Going to California, is this about coming up with a plan B for 2024? Does Gavin need to stand by?
THE PRESIDENT: Are you ready?
Q Yes, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m looking for — I’m looking at you. We’re looking at you.
If Biden was devising “a Plan B for 2024,” he wasn’t likely to announce it on his way to Marine One before attending fundraisers for his own presidential campaign in California.
Other than the occasional speech — like this week’s announcement at a California library on student-debt relief, “The Supreme Court blocked it, but that didn’t stop me,” — the only time Biden speaks at length and off-the-cuff anymore is at these fundraisers for his campaign and the Democratic Party. We almost never get video of Biden at these closed-door fundraisers, but the White House releases a transcript of the president’s remarks.
At Biden’s fundraiser in Beverly Hills, Calif., earlier this week, he boasted that every world leader over the past 40 years has told him, privately, that he must beat Donald Trump in 2024.
Every single world leader that I’ve known, and I’ve known all of them — literally all of them the last 40 years — every single one, when I attend international meetings now — not a joke — grabs my arm and says, “You’ve got to win. You’ve got to win because my democracy is at stake.” (Applause.)
In San Francisco, at the home of Gordon Getty, one of the heirs to the Getty oil fortune, Biden repeated one of his favorite stories, about the time Jill Biden got mad at him over news coverage claiming that he was the poorest U.S. senator:
In addition to that, we’re in a situation where — you know, we now have — which is not a bad — I’m a capitalist, although I — for 36 years, I was listed as the poorest man in Congress. (Laughter.) Not a joke. I got a phone call, Jer, when I was campaigning for Pat Leahy in the — in the mid-’90s.
And I got a call — I called every night, as you all when you’re away and your kid is at home. I called Jill, who was teaching school — my wife. And I said, “How are you doing?” And she said, “Fine.” (Laughter.) Okay, well, I’m in trouble. I said, “What’s the matter?” “Nothing.”
I said, “Jill, what’s the matter?” She said, “Did you read today’s paper?” — meaning the Wilmington News Journal. And I said, “They don’t have it up here, honey.” And she said, “Well, top of the fold, ‘Biden, Poorest Man in Congress.’ Is that true?” (Laughter.) I swear to God, true story.
Biden has told versions of this story several times. The best fact-checkers can determine, Biden usually ranked near the bottom of Congress in net worth, but he was never the poorest. No one has ever found the newspaper headline Biden describes. (It must have been an awfully slow news day for the Wilmington News Journal to put Biden’s financial-disclosure forms above the fold on the front page.) And note that as vice president, Biden claimed to audiences that he didn’t have a savings account, when his financial-disclosure form indicated he did.
Also at that San Francisco fundraiser, Biden appeared to have trouble remembering a particular word:
THE PRESIDENT: But any rate, the point is that we now have — which — I’m a capitalist. I’m all for people making as much money as they can fairly. But just — just pay your fair share. Closing loophole — right now, there are a thousand billionaires in America. It was 780 before the — before the — the recession — the recession. It was a recession, but before the — we got in the — in the problem of the —
AUDIENCE MEMBER: The pandemic?
THE PRESIDENT: — dealing with the pandemic. And — and — but there are now a thousand of them.
Anyone can have trouble finding the right word, but . . . Biden couldn’t remember the word “pandemic”?
Biden also repeated the story about pollution being so bad in 1950 that people experienced oil slicks on their car windshields with rain or frost:
I went to a little Catholic school that was only about, I guess, probably a half a mile from where we moved to — a apartment complex we moved into. It was easy enough to walk, but I was in third grade, and my daughter — my sister was in first grade. And so, Mom used to drive us to school, to the parking lot, and then leave.
But every time the first frost would come, when it would come, we’d turn on the windshield wipers, and you’d get an oil slick. Not a joke. An oil slick. And so, we became aware of the i- — the issue of pollution really starkly early on.
Well, there’s still tens of thousands of people in America who get up and have a figurative or literal oil slick on their windows getting up.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, writing in 2022:
The Wilmington News Journal has records dating back to 1923. They contain no stories I could find about oil slicks on car windshields in Delaware. I e-mailed the Journal and a reply came from Phil Freedman, regional editor for investigations and enterprise: “Dust and ash and other debris used to more regularly fall on cars and other horizontal surfaces there when those operations were running at full capacity. Biden has used this anecdote about the oil on the windshields before. I and a reporter who has covered him extensively, recall. But we cannot find the actual clips nor did we ever confirm it. It was just one of a bunch of stories he told.”
At a speech in Massachusetts in 2022, Biden said that the oil on the windshield wipers was why he and so many other people he grew up with had cancer:
The first frost, you knew what was happening. You had to put on your windshield wipers to get, literally, the oil slick off the window. That’s why I and so damn many other people I grew up [with] have cancer and why can- — for the longest time, Delaware had the highest cancer rate in the nation.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said Biden was referring to his past experiences with basal-cell carcinoma. But basal-cell carcinoma is caused by sun exposure, not pollution.
It is not hard to find columnists and political thinkers who will look at some national or international problem and conclude that in order to solve the problem, “Biden needs to make the case” for X. (X can be anything from “why Americans should care about Ukraine,” to his second-term agenda, to “why his vice president is the best choice to succeed him.”)
He can’t. The team around him is terrified of putting him out in front of the public without a teleprompter. Speaking to a room full of high-dollar donors at a billionaire’s house is just about the easiest assignment possible in American politics. Audiences don’t get any more friendly or forgiving. Everybody in that room has donated more to the Biden campaign ($3,300) than the average American monthly mortgage payment ($2,833 on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage).
And Biden’s team has decided he needs notecards for that.
ADDENDUM: Over in that other Washington publication I write for, an observation that the handling of President Biden’s German shepherd, Commander, is an inadvertent demonstration of how Biden and the staff around him tend to deny problems until they’ve become much worse, and far too glaring to ignore anymore:
If you worked in the White House, how many times would you need to see the president’s dog bite a Secret Service agent or other staffer before you concluded there was a major problem and that a large, aggressive dog shouldn’t be stuck in the White House?
Because 25 times feels like a lot.
But it wasn’t until October that Commander, after more than two dozen attacks, was finally banished. The president’s dog pulling a Cujo is an abnormal situation, but it seems that in this White House, everyone just has to pretend that something that is obviously, glaringly, undeniably not right is totally unremarkable.