I knew it meant trouble when I saw Michael Shear’s story in the July 4 edition of The Times about how, just days after his debate gaffe, President Biden stumbled while speaking to a Black radio host and said he was proud to be “the first Black woman to work with a Black president.”
First off, the only white man who can claim to be the “first black woman” in the Oval Office is Bill Clinton. Black fans call him the “first black president” and feminist fans call him the “first woman president.”
Second, we are entering a new post-debate period with President Biden where every word he says will be scrutinized. He has always been a fast talker and a loudmouth, but as he gets older, words and thoughts sometimes come out of the wrong order. He also now speaks more slurred, sometimes jumbling words, clashing words and thoughts, dropping words, skipping gaps, and choppy sentences.
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The Times, said he has begun using a translation headset when traveling abroad, even when he is 20 feet away from the president, so that if Biden starts tweeting, the audio is amplified.
The White House press corps, infuriated by criticism that it had not been clear enough about the president’s dwindling powers, is now on high alert and ready to tear down the curtain of optimism that Biden’s family and aides have erected.
The White House and Biden campaign have been suffocatingly protective, with news outlets reporting that Biden aides helped draft questions for local radio hosts to ask the president after the disastrous debate.
In examining Biden’s misstatements in the Times article, Scheer used the phrase “he likely meant …”
And this is going to be a big problem going forward. A panicked White House will be chiding and harping on journalists who don’t properly interpret the president’s omissions and confusions, as if they were unfairly criticizing him for every gaffe he makes. As Joe Scarborough, the president’s supporter and confidant, put it in X, “the breathless NYT syntax blog.”
But how the president puts his words together, or doesn’t put them together, is a matter of life and death. We’re in a gray area right now about what the president is going to say. It was intended What to say, or whether or not you understand what was said, and whether or not you should accept the White House’s interpretation.
Journalists will likely offer appropriate resistance to the White House’s claims that Biden said the words, or to corrections based on the White House’s perspective. It was intended It’s not our job to play Mad Libs with the president.
Ronald Reagan’s press secretaries issued numerous clarifications after his press conferences, but it wasn’t because he was hard to hear — even in his 70s he spoke in a clear baritone — that his explanations were meant to correct statements such as those he made about trees causing more pollution than cars.
Biden’s ramblings and sudden pianissimo drop are worth covering because they are a microcosm of the question at the heart of the 2024 Democratic race: Is the president mentally strong enough to beat Donald Trump, and can he hold on for another four years? And the desperate Biden team is prepared to fight over every word.
In a column on Saturday, I quoted Biden telling ABC’s George Stephanopoulos how he would feel if Trump became president because he refused to step down: “As long as I’ve done my best and I’ve done the best job I can, that’s how I would feel. That’s what this is all about.”
Now, “best” is not the word. But my researcher Andrew Transke and I listened to the video 10 times with our ears against the computer, and that’s what it sounded like. We also looked at the ABC News transcript, and that was the word they used. The Times reporter and reporters at other outlets took their cues from the ABC transcript.
The confusion was so widespread that Axios Saturday used two different versions: Mike Allen’s newsletter used “best” and another article used “I did the best job I knew I could.”
After my column was published Saturday morning, Biden campaign spokesman TJ Ducklo emailed me to “alert” that ABC News had updated the transcript to read: “I feel like I did my best and did the best job I knew I could, and that’s what this is about.”
Ducklo asked if he could “tweak” the column, change the word “best,” and make my story “consistent with the corrected transcript,” even though the edited version was still gibberish.
When I said I would share his thoughts with my editor, Ducklo responded, “Well, again, it’s not my opinion. It’s the opinion of ABC News, which did the interview. I think it’s pretty unusual for The Times to claim that the president said something that the outlet that did the interview says he didn’t say…”
Andrew and I emailed Ducklo to ask whether ABC made any changes to the transcript on its own or whether the Biden team requested the changes.
“ABC News, like any news organization, makes its own independent editorial decisions,” Ducklo wrote us back. “You’re not saying we don’t,” he emailed back, adding, “We’ve discussed this again. ABC News has received the tapes, acknowledged the error, and has made the correction.”
I was more confused than ever. What tape? From who? Why was it being shuffled around? Given how badly the White House has covered up Biden’s sagging skin, the press secretary’s reticence seemed routine. By Saturday night, Shear and Michael Grynbaum wrote a Times article clarifying the situation. In fact, the White House had asked ABC News to verify whether the president had said “goodest” or “good as” after White House stenographers who recorded the president’s remarks on ABC News noticed a discrepancy between their recording and the network’s transcript.
The Times annotated my column and all news articles that used the word “best” to explain the source of the confusion.
Whatever the president was trying to say, his answer to that question was beside the point. Who cares if he’s happy in a losing situation?
This may seem like a bang-up ruckus about good intentions, but it portends growing tensions between the bunker-mode White House and the ferret-mode press corps.
Perhaps the White House should think about subtitling.
