President Joe Biden meets with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday.
This column recently advised President Joe Biden to stop speaking in public, at least when the topic is important. Mr. Biden’s habit of making ill-considered spontaneous remarks argues for carefully crafted statements of policy. Ideally, the President would take special pains to avoid off-the-cuff comments about nuclear-armed regimes. It now appears that some people in the White House agree with this column. Unfortunately the President is not among them. Carol Lee, Peter Nicholas, Kristen Welker and Courtney Kube of NBC News report:
Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.
Readers who have tried to diagram Biden sentences may not entirely agree that the President is plain-spoken, and some may even question whether his public conversation amounts to a “potent asset.” But the NBC report offers an intriguing picture of the Biden White House, informed in large part by anonymous sources:
. . . Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct statement—only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called…