As you have probably figured out by now, I do not usually accede to conventional wisdom. But sometimes the conventional wisdom is correct. This past week it was generally agreed that President Joe Biden had delivered a brilliant State of the Union speech. And he really did.
My favorite moment came when he addressed the Justices of the Supreme Court sitting directly in front of him. “With all due respect, justices, women are not without electoral or political power," Then he ad libbed, "You’re about to realize just how much …”
Boy, did they NOT like that. As Democratic legislators seated behind them rose to applaud the line the justices sat stony faced.
But this post is less about the content of the speech and more about the way the press managed expectations of it.
Two old colleagues got at this point in their analyses. First Jonathan Alter, a liberal from the days when we all agreed on what “liberal” meant:
Then Dick Polman, former political columnist of the Philadelphia Inquirer, currently teaching at the University of Pennsylvania and writing here:
What the two columns share is an implicit criticism of the way the working press — as opposed to those of us who have either aged out or, in my case, been forced out of regular employment in institutional journalism — have reported the Biden presidency. The conventional wisdom gathering for most of the last 18 months among the Beltway press has been, Biden’s too old for the job.
Other aspects of his presidency have gone virtually uncovered to continue reporting on his age. The man’s age is a legitimate subject for reporting, but it should not be an obsession. There are other things to report on from a political point of view.
The extraordinary job numbers would be one example. Yes, economics and business reporters cover the monthly job figures. (Although I don’t find the reporting to be as thorough and understandable as the work of Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute whose tweets on the labor market are invaluable). But what I don’t get from insitutional journalism is political reporting about how White House policy has shaped this remarkable surge in job creation.
There are two reasons for this:
First is the news business and its need for constant online engagement—clicks—to set its ad rates and have a hope of surviving as a business proposition. This search for profit in a process that undermines the practice of good journalism is the end product of changes in the news business that go back 40 years and that I write about in part three of my other substack, History of a Calamity, starting here.
The nuts and bolts of White House economic policy will never generate clicks. But articles about Biden’s verbal gaffes, amplified on twitter and other social media, certainly does generate clicks. The death loop of opinion polling about Biden being too old, and clickbait articles in the institutional press about that poll and the chorus of independent political hacks who also survive on clicks echoing the same poll is now well-established.
Second is something more subtle. It has to do with an expectation, created by the press, that the President is in some ways omnipotent, he makes all decisions: from the mundane to the historically important. It’s obviously not true. Political reporters know this but they can’t help themselves. If twitter is alight with people wondering why a situation is being allowed to fester, get out of hand, or simply exist and asking why the President isn’t doing something about it, political reporters have to take up the cry on behalf of the social media masses. And if the current President doesn’t respond, well then it must be that he’s too old. Needs a nap. His mind wanders.
I recognize this behavior among colleagues from the pre-twitter days when I did daily journalism for NPR. When Tony Blair won his landslide victory in 1997, he very rapidly completed a historical process that had begun in earnest with Churchill’s second spell as Prime Minister and the advent of television: this coincidence inevitably made the post of Prime Minister more Presidential.
Blair took this to a new extreme. He was more than first among equals but a true chief executive with most decision making made in his office not by consensus reached around Downing Street’s cabinet table. The problem with this management approach is that political decisions cut across so many areas and new ones have to be made every day, and when they aren’t a hungry press can be used to bring pressure for that decision.
Throughout the final push for Northern Ireland’s Good Friday agreement and in the years after as it bedded down, there were inevitable bottlenecks in negotiation and then, implementation. These slowdowns always held the possibility of an outbreak of violence if they weren’t dealt with. Blair, of course, had a lot of other things to give his attention to. While he was taking care of other business, the press would blow Northern Ireland’s issue out of proportion. Eventually Blair, as chief executive, would fly to Northern Ireland, and quickly cut whatever Gordian knot the local politicians had tied, and the process would move forward again. It rarely took more than a morning and he would fly back to London to get on with other things.
Biden is in the same boat, laden down by the expectation that he and he alone can make a decision, only when he doesn’t act with alacrity it has to be because he is too old.
This week, after the State of the Union, the Washington Post had an excellent in depth piece about Biden’s decision making process:
This section of the piece, about the process by which decisions are made in the Biden White House resonated for me:
Faced with a decision, Biden first presses his staffers for information at a granular level, probing for specific costs and timelines — seemingly driven, associates say, by a suspicion that aides are hiding something from him, or not giving him all of his options. Biden, aides say, often behaves like the senator he once was, wading into small matters they fear are not worth his time. He will insist on reviewing routine statements released in his name, for example, or demand a personal sign-off on mid-level campaign hires.
The decisions that reach the Oval Office are, by design, the most complicated facing the country. Biden has said as much, telling aides, “Look, all these decisions are hard.” Former president Barack Obama concurred, writing in 2020: “No decision that landed on my desk had an easy, tidy answer. The black-and-white questions never made it to me — somebody else on my staff would have already answered them.”
For all the memos and briefings, presidents are profoundly alone in making these decisions, and in that moment of truth, they rely on those whom life has taught them to trust. For Biden, that means people who have braved the campaign trail.
All areas of American life require executive action at one time or another by the occupant of the White House and all those actions take time, time social media and modern journalism enslaved to its’ prestissimo tempo don’t allow for.
But you can’t fast forward reality and decisions will come in good time. Biden knows what he is doing and by all accounts is diligent in going about his business. But he is old, no doubt about it, and we all know it. News used to be about reporting on things people didn’t know, so they could be better informed.
Anyway, Beltway reporters looking at the prospects for the upcoming election might want to give the age question a rest and follow up on the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch weekly data column:
In the article he backs up with data something I’ve reported on anecdotally over the decades. Black, Latino, Asian voters, the ones grouped under the rubric “people of color” are much more small “c” conservative than the press understands. From the homophobia of the African-American community, to the anti-immigrant sentiment of Hispanics living near the US-Mexico border, and the general anti-tax feelings of new immigrants from all over who make up a considerable slice of America’s small business owners—the data now shows them drifting away from the Democratic Party.
Luckily for the Democrats, the uniquely awful prospect of another Trump presidency may slow the trend this year. That, and as Joe Biden told the justices of the Supreme Court, on Thursday night: women are going to vote Democrat to regain the rights stripped away by the Court.
He may be old, but Joe knows his stuff.