We saw a bit of an odd sight in Allentown, Pennsylvania on Friday, with Biden staff running Joe Biden from store to store, engaging with workers in informal settings, rather than giving a formal speech, that he was bound to mess up.
Turns out this is a part of a new strategy to make him look more relatable and translation: not as old.
Biden, these people said, is taking advice from confidants who’ve suggested he try a more casual approach in public to try to ease one of voters’ chief concerns about his 2024 candidacy: his age.
That means more informal remarks, unannounced stops at diners and appearances in social media posts and on podcasts, as well as fewer ties and Rose Garden ceremonies. The series of subtle shifts, which aides say they’ve proposed to him in multiple conversations over the past few months, are meant to signal that Biden is more youthful than his 81 years might suggest.
Either they’re trying to buffalo the media and the public, or they truly believe this. I’m not sure which is worse. Taking off a tie doesn’t make you look younger, it isn’t the tie or the clothes — it’s the incoherence in the product they’re trying to sell. And that will still be there, tie or not.
Listen to this, it’s delusional:
“His superpower is his authenticity,” another campaign adviser said. The adviser stressed that Biden’s re-election effort is seeking to put more of that side of him on display in the next 10 months before Election Day.
Aides, who describe him as the “ultimate extrovert,” hope the efforts will also give Biden a boost. They say he often leaves a room with more energy than he had going into it and note that he has prided himself on being a self-described “tactile” politician.
“Campaign Biden is the best Biden,” said Scott Mulhauser, who was deputy chief of staff to Biden, then the vice president, in the 2012 campaign. “Moments like these, in particular, are a terrific reminder of how genuine he is, just how much he loves interacting with folks on the trail and discussing the issues that matter — and how great that is for him and for the campaign.”
Authenticity? Genuine? Biden is constantly telling falsehoods, making up things that aren’t true as easily as he breathes. If he were great at campaigning, they wouldn’t have hidden him in 2020 and they wouldn’t have spent all this time restricting media from access to him now.
They have spent so much time cutting him off from the media (who are generally friendly), but now they’re going to run him out to all sorts of informal meetings with random people in situations that they will not be able to control as tightly as speeches. Do they really think that’s going to rehabilitate the public’s perception of him?
In their first full run of this on Friday, it turned out to be a dismal failure, as I reported. He got confused, a heckler called him a “loser,” and he made some kind of weird approach to a girl.
This video is perhaps the best example of the folly of this new strategy. They kept running him around in all kinds of different locations. That requires him to adapt to those things. He looked frighteningly confused as a bike store worker tried to direct him. The worker even appeared to touch him to hold him in place, as Biden seemed to look down for his mark to hit.
This is supposed to be the leader of the free world. This is scary.
Then there’s the other problem that’s going to keep coming back and biting them: the creepy behavior with girls, including when he sniffs them.
So they’re just going to increase the possibility of these things happening? They’re going to expose his age to us more?
They going to have far more to deal with than the mistakes in the speeches, if they continue with this.
