WASHINGTON (AP) – No press conference. No Oval Office address. No prime-time speeches at a joint congressional session.
President Joe Biden is the first executive in four decades to reach that point in his term without holding a formal question and answer session. It reflects a White House media strategy aimed at both reserving major media scenarios for celebrating a legislative victory and limiting the unforced errors of a historically prone to gaffe politician.
Biden chose to answer questions as often as most of his recent predecessors, but he tends to answer just one or two informal questions at a time, usually in a hurried environment at the end of an event.
In sharp contrast to the previous government, the White House is exercising extreme message discipline, enabling employees to speak, but doing so with caution. Recalling Biden’s virtually leak-free campaign and the Obama button administration, the new White House team carefully managed the president’s appearances, trying to lower the temperature in Washington from Donald Trump and save a big moment in the media to mark what could soon to be a signature accomplishment: approval of the COVID-19 bill.
Message tracking may serve the president’s purposes, but it denies the media’s opportunities to pressure Biden directly on key political issues and to engage in the kind of shuttle that can extract information and thoughts that go beyond government-selected discussion points. .
“The president missed an opportunity, I think, to speak to the country from the attacking pulpit. The volume was so low at the Biden White House that they need to be concerned if someone is listening, ”said Frank Sesno, former head of the George Washington University media school. “But he is not great at these press conferences. He wanders. Your strongest communication is not out of time. “
Other modern presidents answered more questions during their early days in office.
At this point, in their terms, Trump and George HW Bush had held five press conferences each, Bill Clinton four, George W. Bush three, Barack Obama two and Ronald Reagan one, according to a study by Martha Kumar, a fellow. presidential and emeritus professor at Towson University.
Biden gave five interviews, against nine by Reagan and 23 by Obama.
“Biden came up with a plan for how they wanted to disseminate the information. When you compare it to Trump, Biden is aware of how you use a team, that a president cannot do everything alone, ”said Kumar. “Biden has a press secretary who gives regular briefings. He knows that you give a press conference when you have something to say, especially a victory. They have an idea of how to use that time, at the beginning of the administration, when people are paying attention, and how valuable this is. ”
The new president answered questions 39 times, according to Kumar’s survey, although usually only one or two shouted questions from a group of reporters known as the press pool at the end of an event at the State Dining Room or at the Oval Office of the House White.
These exchanges can sometimes be awkward, with the cacophony of screams or the humming of the propellers of the presidential helicopter in neutral in Gramado Sul, making a significant exchange difficult.
“Press conferences are essential for informing the American people and maintaining a responsible government before the public,” said Associated Press reporter Zeke Miller, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association. “As it did with previous presidents, the WHCA continues to call on President Biden to hold formal press conferences on a regular basis.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday defended the president’s accessibility to the media and suggested that a press conference would probably be in late March.
“I would say his focus is on getting recovery and relief for the American people and he hopes to continue to engage with all of you and other members of the media who are not here today,” said Psaki. “And we look forward to informing you, as soon as the press conference is scheduled.”
The president’s first speech at a joint congressional session – not technically a State of the Union speech, but a speech that normally has the same pomp – is also tentatively planned for the end of March, advisers said. However, the format of the address is uncertain due to the pandemic.
The president received high marks for two great scripted speeches, his inaugural speech and his speech marking the 500,000th death for COVID-19.
After overcoming a child stutter, Biden has long had fun with reporters and defies requests from aides to ignore questions from the press. Notoriously wordy, Biden was subject to gaffes throughout his long political career and, as president, occasionally struggled with improvised comments.
The use of the phrase “Neanderthal thinking” this week to describe the decision by the governors of Texas and Mississippi to suspend the masks’ mandates has dominated a new cycle and has attracted the ire of Republicans. This created the kind of distraction that his advisers tried to avoid and, in a pandemic, were largely able to dodge during the campaign because the virus kept Biden at home for months and limited the potential for public error.
Firmly promising his belief in press freedom, Biden rebuked his predecessor’s incendiary rhetoric in the media, including Trump’s references to reporters as “the enemy of the people.” Biden restored the daily press conference, which had been extinguished under Trump, opening a window for the White House to function. His team also released cable news to promote the COVID-19 relief bill.
And while Biden’s own Twitter account, in a sharp break with Trump’s social media habits, often offers routine posts, his team leader Ron Klain has become a frequent tweeter, using the platform to amplify messages and criticize opponents.
Delaying the press conference and the joint speech also, symbolically, kept the first chapter of Biden’s presidency open and perhaps extended his honeymoon. His approval rating was 60% in a survey released on Friday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University’s faculty of communications, said Biden’s “rope-by-rope” strategy was the right one for the moment.
“Presidential press conferences are not high on the agenda of Americans who are concerned about COVID and the economic disaster that has befallen so many families,” he said.
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Lemire reported from New York.