Joe Biden’s presidency is damned by dull competence
Casting an eye over the virtual front pages of The Washington Post, The New York Times, or even The Wall Street Journal most mornings, one might be struck by how they share one remarkable if boring similarity: it can often take a while to spot any reference to The World’s Most Powerful Man. No, this isn’t Elon Musk we’re talking about but the World’s Other Most Powerful Man. Today, The Washington Post’s firstmention of the President of the United States was well down the page and in reference to his commuting sentences for 78 people. Elsewhere, the President is named as the Biden administration moves to phase out incandescent lightbulbs, as well as potentially cancelling some student loan debt. Biden is then “leading tributes to Madeleine Albright” in a sidebar and his name is quoted in the context of events in Myanmar ahead of a visit to the region. Then there’s a piece describing the administration’s success in rolling out policies to help rural areas.
Please, try not to fall asleep at the back, though I know it’s difficult. These small Joe Biden stories just don’t excite the reader or get the blood pumping. Page clicks will be down on all those articles (“sack the journalists!” cry the folk in accounts) because all of it falls firmly in the domain of hard news. Yet here we have the central contradiction of the Biden presidency: who wants to celebrate a technocrat in the age of the autocrat? It is also the Democrats’ chief dilemma heading into the mid-terms in November. At a time when “sober” is tantamount to “dull”, this boringly sober presidency runs the risk of being absent from the public eye. Even worse: this administration just doesn’t know how to sell itself.
It’s an analysis that of course runs counter to some that you might have read but that’s the nature of this capricious media beast we’re all riding. How do we objectively judge a president in a climate of outrageous smears and petty slander? Who wants to talk about the US job figures (11 months of 400k+ increases and the best run since 1939) when Senator Ted Cruz is busy predicting gay sex between Mickey Mouse and Pluto (yes, that did happen)? Who wants the old politics when the new politics is sexier and rakes in the cash?
One needn’t go full-scale Q-Anon (or even Cruz-Anon) with tales of Satanic space lasers and moon-based paedophiles. Some variation of “Doddery Biden risks World War 3” is far more exciting than “Biden cracks down on wasteful light bulbs” or even “Biden’s getting it right on Ukraine”. It’s why a rabid section of the US media portrays Biden as a president in decline and why this message of septuagenarian dotage is parroted in increasingly excitable terms by many on this side of the Atlantic. It’s also so believable precisely because Biden does little to discredit it. He just doesn’t play that game.
Compared to the 45th president, the 46th doesn’t grab the headlines every day and, in the absence of crazy statements about buying Greenland or ingesting bleach, critics leap on the kind of gaffes that politicians routinely make but Biden makes more often because of his lifelong battle against a speech disorder. Yet there is an alternative (and far less exciting) story that could be presented. It presents a picture of Biden eating with troops, showing genuine rapport with people, bringing dignity back to the Oval Office, and a strategy over Ukraine that has thus far been pitch-perfect, purposefully re-establishing NATO as the bastion against Russian aggression. It would be a story about a government that goes about its business with a dutiful (if dull) sense of competence.
Yet for that narrative to break through, the White House would need to understand communications better than it seems to do. It routinely struggles to make a case to the very many in America and beyond willing to accept dull competence over continued crises. Whilst they’ve reasonably struggled to explain why two votes block nearly everything going through the Senate (Joe Manchin remains an enigma wrapped inside a cheque from the coal lobby), they could and should argue in favour of things that haven’t happened.
When eager sorts took to the airwaves to talk about no-fly zones over Ukraine (an idea which implausibly gained traction for a while), the administration tapped the idea down for what it was: a senseless prevarication in a situation where Russia was already badly losing. This is the kind of success for which Biden’s team deserves considerable credit. Each time Russia attempts to escalate the rhetoric, US diplomats do the opposite. Witness Anthony Blinken vs Rand Paul during the former’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday. Anybody who thinks it’s not a welcome relief from four years of “fire and fury” surely deludes themselves about what leadership looks like.
Yet this sobriety is not an easy message to sell to the American public. De-escalation, especially in politics, doesn’t yet sell papers. Trump, meanwhile, continues to supercharge any debate. Biden, by contrast, invests too little time in media strategy, which is particularly risky when cable commentary channels (let’s not call it “news”) are full of overheated dumbduckery. It’s no surprise that Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, is reported to be considering a run for the White House. Why wouldn’t he now that politics have become entertainment?
It leaves the Democrats awaiting the mid-terms where they’ll hope that low-key governance backed up by policies that have impacted positively on the lives of voters will win out over toxic messaging from the Republicans. It’s probably a naïve hope. Nothing suggests that Democrats have the strategy – dare one say “guts” – to make it work. Republicans will shamelessly shout about the use of the word “gay” in Florida schools or about the “critical race theory” supposedly flooding universities but Democrats appear unwilling to match them in either volume or intensity despite the opportunities that exist for a party perfectly positioned to reflect the majority opinion on everything from the defending the Constitution to abortion rights.
President Obama was right, recently, when he said that Democrats “got a story to tell”. The doubt right now is whether they have the appetite to tell it.