Less is more. That is the new campaigning from the basement strategy of Team Biden.
The Biden campaign is desperately trying to turn things around for the president. There is a strong sense of Trump nostalgia among voters. They are thinking back to the Trump years and remembering that things were going well until the pandemic hit, which he had nothing to do with. Even among the lockdowns and economic woes attributed to the pandemic, the economy was beginning to recover. Then Joe Biden came into office and blew everything up.
Biden cannot get through a speech without mumbling and bumbling. He loses his place on the teleprompter and tries to ad-lib, which results in disaster. The truth is that he is unable to do much more than short speeches without needing clean-up by his staff.
Campaigns often blame difficulty in getting out their message on communication problems but Biden can’t deliver a message. Communication clarity doesn’t matter if the messenger can’t articulate the message. Biden’s campaign wants to hone a sharper message that he can take into the general election. His aides are taking to the airwaves to say that the plan is for Biden to deliver fewer, not more speeches. The idea is to concentrate on quality, not quantity.
“There’s a strategic advantage at this point in the race to boiling down your message to the three or four most salient, compelling arguments for why President Biden should be re-elected,” said TJ Ducklo, the Biden campaign’s senior adviser for communications. “That will often translate to the stump [speech] being whittled down to its sharpest, most dynamic form. That’s what you’re seeing.”
Two words not normally associated with Joe Biden – sharp and dynamic. He is neither.
Let’s be clear about how Biden has been campaigning. He speaks to small groups of friendly supporters. He is courting demographics with which he is losing support, which is all of them at this point. He brought fried chicken to a black family in North Carolina (yes, really). Biden and Jill Biden brought Italian food to an Italian family to remind voters that Jill is from an Italian family or something. Biden met with locals on an elected official’s front porch in one town. It’s all cringeworthy.
The press is kept away from Biden. The staff is too nervous about what he may say. Can you imagine Trump’s staff keeping the press away from him? He’ll stand and talk to them all day long, given the opportunity.
That dramatic shift hasn’t happened, but aides say the idea has been discussed as the campaign tries to find ways to reach an unsettled electorate that consumes information differently than in previous cycles. Discussing the idea is also a reflection, aides say, of how much harder it is to get — and keep — voters’ attention.
Biden stops by coffee shops and ice cream shops but those visits are awkward at best. He’s surprised that a smoothie costs $7 in an upscale coffee shop. Biden botched a visit to a fast-food place that his advance team had arranged for him. He decided to order a milkshake for himself at the last minute. Then he gave the cashier some cash as he said he knew his order had already been paid for, so it looked like he was tipping the bewildered cashier. Oof.
Old Yeller needs to go home, go sit on the beach in Delaware, and enjoy his retirement.
He is delivering short speeches because that is all he can do.
The president has in recent weeks made notable efforts at brevity, in both official and campaign events. Biden’s remarks this past week on the campus protests over the war in the Gaza Strip were just four minutes long. His high-profile speech on abortion rights in Florida last week was just 14 minutes long. And his speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner lasted just 10 minutes — half as long as the year before.
Biden’s speeches are not as timely as they should be for a president on top of the situation. He has not fully addressed the nation on our role in the Israel-Hamas war. He should have delivered a speech that laid out his plans and what he would be doing to support Israel months ago. Instead, he has buried his head in the sand and gone wobbly in favor of making purely political decisions. He wants the votes of Muslim Arab Americans in places like Dearborn, Michigan in November. He is throwing Israel under the bus to gain those votes. It is disgraceful. It is dangerous for Israel because Biden’s weakness is a green light for Hamas to continue to attack Israel.
It is reported that the campaign has not put together a speechwriting team. That is problematic for Biden because he doesn’t do well in off-the-cuff remarks. He fabricates personal stories and he tries to make jokes that don’t land well.
Team Biden knows that the candidate is in trouble. They aren’t willing to risk doing big campaign rallies because Biden isn’t up to it and he can’t deliver. Maybe small events will work for him. In the meantime, he is not inspiring voters to get ready to vote for him. There is a malaise among Americans because, in Biden’s America, life is not as good as it was in the Trump years. The campaign has its work cut out for it if they are to drag Biden over the finish line. For now, the election looks like Trump’s to lose, even with the lawfare waged against him by the Biden administration.