The last time Joe Biden made even a token effort to appear as if he was taking questions from the entire White House press corps was 610 days ago, just days after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and ended his party’s unified control over Washington.
Standing in the White House’s State Dining Room, Biden kept to a list of reporters chosen by his aides and held forth for just under an hour, answering questions from eight reporters on topics as varied as Russia’s war against Ukraine, the impact of Democrats’ loss of the House of Representatives, and his plans to run for a second term.
Nearly two years later, with numerous members of his party calling for him to stand aside from his re-election in the wake of his dismal debate performance against Donald Trump last month, Biden and his aides pinned their hopes on another press conference to convince doubters of his continued fitness for office.
At the close of the NATO summit in Washington, it was announced last week that Biden would hold what one reporter from Bloomberg News jokingly dubbed a “big boy news conference,” in comparison to the smaller “two and two” sessions he sometimes holds with foreign leaders.
The highly-touted question-and-answer session was meant to prove that Biden is still up to the rigors of a campaign by holding the sort of freewheeling back-and-forth with reporters that Trump engaged in on multiple occasions, rather than the more controlled and stage-managed interactions that have characterized his presidency.
That goal was under threat even as Biden prepared to take the stage, as he’d made a significant verbal blunder just hours earlier when he mixed up the names of two leaders who could never be mistaken for each other, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
He compounded the error just minutes into his press conference, when after he concluded remarks delivered from a prepared, teleprompter-borne script on the success of the NATO summit and the strength of the 75-year-old alliance, he responded to a question about Vice President Kamala Harris’ qualifications by referring to her as “Vice President Trump.”
At one point, he lost his train of thought while answering a question about whether other world leaders are concerned about the possibility that his abilities have declined, instead pivoting to the success of the NATO summit he’d just hosted.
But Biden’s performance for the balance of the one hour, four-minute session was unremarkable, in a good way.
He responded to detailed foreign policy questions with equally detailed answers that went on for minutes at a time, demonstrating a command of facts one would expect from a former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and ex-Vice President.
Biden defiantly continued to say he will be staying in the presidential race, and told another reporter who asked about his cognitive status that his doctors have seen no reason for him to undergo any more neurological exams than the three he has already taken since entering the White House.
But the performance the 81-year-old president put in was just that — a performance — and one that was highly choreographed to a fault.
Normally, as a reporter attending a press conference, one raises their hand and tries to get the speaker’s attention. The speaker points, you ask your question, you hopefully get an answer.
But it became clear that this wasn’t going to be that sort of press conference within minutes of entering the room.
White House press office staffers moved reporters around, making sure certain journalists were near the aisles or the outer ends of the rows of seats.
And sure enough, despite the promise of a “big boy” press conference, Biden — the man who can single-handedly order a nuclear strike that could snuff out millions in an instant — called the names of those his assistants had picked out for him.
After he finished, one TV correspondent with a booming voice was able to get him to address the fact that he’d mixed up Harris and Trump earlier, but White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre quickly took up a microphone to cut off any other reporter’s effort to ask him anything else.
At the end of the event, when The Independent noted to a White House press office staffer that Biden’s press conference had been “choreographed,” she responded that that view was “negative.”
If Biden’s job was to convince voters, skeptical Democrats in Congress and elsewhere that he’s still up for running and winning against Trump a second time, the deluge of statements calling for his withdrawal within moments of the press conference ending is a strong indicator that his fellow Democrats don’t think he did what he had to do.