"Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining"
Why can't the Biden campaign be honest about the Super Bowl interview?
To borrow language from Judge Judy, if you’re standing next to me pissing on my leg, don’t look at my face and tell me it’s raining. But that’s exactly what President Joe Biden is doing as he skips yet another Super Bowl interview, a political tradition since Barack Obama’s presidency. Last year, the White House suggested that the problem was Fox, but this year CBS — a broadcaster whose news programs are as milquetoast as they come — is hosting the event and the Biden administration has a new excuse:
Biden advisers tell CNN they see skipping the interview, which would have aired as a segment of the pregame show and not during peak viewing hours on the CBS broadcast, as a strategic decision to give Americans a break from the politics of the 2024 campaign. Advisers say they’re seeing people already expressing fatigue with election news and want to avoid piling on.
Yes, the president who almost never does press conferences or interviews is concerned about inserting politics into the Super Bowl. The White House, according to communications director Ben LaBolt, just wants to make sure Americans can “enjoy watching what they tuned in for — the game.”
Biden’s excuses for not speaking to the public during the game would be more compelling if they were consistent. Last year, it was the right-wing journalists and, this year, it’s something about keeping politics out of our football.
Of course, everybody knows the truth — Biden can’t handle late nights at 81 years old. The president made excuses for skipping G20 and NATO summit dinners. In Vietnam, Biden awkwardly told journalists gathered at a presser that he was “going to go to bed.” And, just over a month ago on New Year’s Eve, he held a note card as Ryan Seacrest asked him a few soft ball questions about his Christmas vacation and hopes for the new year.
Biden needs to be honest with himself and the public. If he believes he can run a robust campaign this summer and fall, he should, as Ezra Klein recently wrote, prove it:
But Biden is abnormal — he is the oldest sitting president ever and seems it — and he is not projecting to voters the competence and capability that his party is promising them.
There are ways a deft campaign might reframe this, but that argument needs to be made, and it needs to be made by Biden himself, who is, instead, doing far fewer real interviews and holding far fewer news conferences than his predecessors.
Alternatively, if he can’t, he should step aside. Biden is angry about his bad polling and frets that he isn’t getting sufficient credit for his policy achievements, but refuses to do an interview when the entire country is watching the Super Bowl. Something has to give. Right now, the Biden campaign seems dishonest at best and delusional at worst.
