The media spent the Trump presidency longing for normalcy and decency. Trump’s unabashed authenticity just wasn’t compatible with the presidency. It was “unpresidential” and all that. Jim Acosta is still suffering from PTSD from Trump calling him out and repeatedly bashing his network as “fake news.”
“I’ve got the marks on my back to prove it,” Acosta said.
Somebody give this man a Purple Heart.
So, one can imagine my surprise when Politico’s founding editor John F. Harris gushed over Joe Biden’s recent trashing-talking and said (no joke) that it could “save Biden’s presidency.”
“As a political communicator, President Joe Biden’s most effective moments often come spontaneously, when he is overcome with feeling, or by accident, when words that are intended to be private instead become public,” Harris wrote.
He cited the recent incident with Peter Doocy when Doocy asked him a question he didn’t want to answer about inflation and muttered, “What a stupid son of a bitch.”
This kneejerk response from Biden, which the mainstream media would have dubbed as a flagrant assault on the free press had Trump said it, is not so bad anymore. Why? Because, according to Harris, “Biden’s lapse of presidential decorum hints at a path toward restoring presidential vitality.”
So we’ve become so accustomed to Biden’s weakness and fragility that Biden showing a little gusto, hints that he actually has some fight in him.
This is the same president who got high marks from the media for his recent press conference simply because he didn’t spontaneously combust in the middle of it. The bar is very, very, very, low.
So, Harris seems thrilled that Biden can provide a little unscripted passion because we can forget his incompetence for a little while and admire that he has surpassed expectations by remaining in office this entire time. Harris argues that the Doocy incident “was also a reminder of how many memorable Biden moments feature casual profanity or bursts of authentic emotion amid the pervasive phoniness of contemporary politics.”
Harris cites Biden’s whispering to Obama, “this is a big f***ing deal” after the passage of Obamacare, his challenging an Iowa voter to a push-up contest and telling Trump to shut up during a debate as key examples.
“These exchanges offer a small window into a potential remedy for a big problem,” Harris argues. “Biden has spent his adult life seeking, and finally holds, an office which by many conventional standards he is poorly equipped to hold. The modern presidency at its core is a communications platform. Key to its power, for better and for worse, is its ability to dominate public conversation. A noxious example is the all-consuming grip Trump held on public attention.”
So, basically, Harris says that the cure for Biden’s problems is to be more like Trump. Couldn’t we have kept Trump to begin with? At least then we’d have someone competent running the country.
That, of course, is the big secret that Harris isn’t willing to acknowledge. The Trump presidency was a godsend for the media, and now they have nothing. Their ratings are in the tank because Trump’s unconventional presidency gave them a boost, and Biden is boring in comparison. But a few f-bombs from Biden won’t save his presidency or the mainstream media.
