Bully-pulpit Biden won’t save the day

Bully-pulpit Biden won’t save the day

It’s been a bully-pulpit kind of week for Joe Biden. Against a backdrop of ever more detailed reporting of a disgruntled White House, the president implored Americans to “meet the moment” on gun regulation in a speech yesterday. On Tuesday he put his name to an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on how to fight inflation. (Please send any ideas to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!) On Wednesday, Biden popped up in the New York Times to establish “what America will and will not do in Ukraine.” (The Spectator’s editors are still waiting for the president to file…)

Now, as for the wisdom of this strategy: count me skeptical that Biden, of all presidents, can turn things around with the force of his words. But the White House is reportedly frustrated at their failure to capture the narrative, to occupy America’s attention, for Joe Biden to be the heart of the story. (Remember when it made a virtue of doing the opposite?)

One White House aide explains the president’s dilemma as follows to CNN: “He has to speak to very serious things, and you can’t do that getting ice cream.” C’mon man! I have to write this diary, and, at some stage, figure out what I’m going to have for lunch. We find a way to multitask, Joe.

The anonymous quotes from staffers urging a course correction or complaining about not “getting the message across” are cropping up with increasing frequency. If they sound like the statements from the kind of people who think they are living inside an episode of The West Wing, it’s because that’s exactly what they are. “Let Biden be Biden,” thinks many a frustrated aide on their commute. Unfortunately, however, Joe Biden is not the real-world Jed Bartlet of their dreams. And, more importantly, in the real world “shake-ups,” “speaking from the heart,” or whatever PR-oriented solution some bright young thing in the White House thinks will have the transformative effect it had in a show in which the spin-doctors are the heroes.

Meanwhile, we await an actual plan to fight inflation (for there was no such thing in Biden’s op-ed), a better sense of what America’s goal is in Ukraine (again, not something that was clear from the president’s writing this week). On other fronts, Biden looks set to press ahead with a version of student debt cancellation that, according to the Washington Post’s James Hohmann, “a lot of people very close to the president… privately understand… is a complete disaster.” The more we learn about the baby formula shortage, the more it looks like an entirely avoidable and mishandled disaster. Overseas, the president has performed a full about-turn on his approach to Saudi Arabia. Important issues. And not ones that are easy to juggle with ice-cream consumption.

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Barry Sussman, RIP

Barry Sussman, the Washington Post editor who oversaw the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, has died. I recommend the obituary published by his former employer, not least for some exceptionally bitchy comments about the star reporters who worked for him. Sussman reportedly accused Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of being “wrong often on detail” and sentimentalizing the story in their book-length account of Watergate, All The President’s Men. “I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them,” he later said. RIP, Mr Sussman. And long live petty journalistic feuds.

A (limited) win for free expression at Georgetown

“My long public nightmare is over,” writes Ilya Shapiro in the Wall Street Journal today. Shapiro has been the subject of a maddeningly Kafkaesque attempted cancellation ever since he was hired by Georgetown University’s Law Center as a senior lecturer. The trouble started back in January when Shapiro wrote a few innocuous, if clumsily phrased, tweets about Joe Biden’s Supreme Court nomination process. These online missives triggered campus uproar and Shapiro was placed on protracted administrative leave before he had even started his new job. The university’s HR department and Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity and Affirmative Action spent four months “investigating” the tweets before deciding that the tweets did not pertain to Shapiro’s employment because they were sent before he had started the job. As Shapiro calls it, “a technical victory.” The right outcome, but not one that leaves me feeling especially reassured about the climate on the campus of the capital’s pre-eminent higher education institution.

What you should be reading today

Batya Ungar-Sargon: Why progressive politics is like air travel
Grace Curley: A toxic couple on trial
Stephen L. Miller: Hollywood has a school violence problem
James Kirchick, Common Sense: The First Amendment created gay America
Derek Robertson, Politico magazine: Why a depressed America actually needs Tom Cruise
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal: The Uvalde police scandal

Poll watch

President Biden job approval
Approve: 40.7 percent
Disapprove: 54.0 percent
Net approval: -13.3 (RCP Average)

Teenagers’ views on remote learning
After the Covid-19 outbreak is over would you prefer school to be…
Completely in person: 65 percent
Completely online: 9 percent
A mix: 18 percent
Not sure: 7 percent

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