One of the lesser-known duties of reporters assigned to the White House beat is to spend one day per month in the presidential pool. The pool is a rotating group of reporters who shadow the president whenever he makes a public appearance at the White House or in the Washington, DC area. When you’re up, you’re up — and you only get the details of which event you’ll be attending hours before it happens.
With the election just six days away, I was called up on Wednesday. And because pooling means a lot of time waiting around — for security checks, for the president and everyone else to ready themselves for a public appearance, and so on — I spent a good part of that day planning our election week strategy.
Since President Joe Biden isn’t on the ballot this year, having ceded the Democratic ticket to Vice President Kamala Harris, he was able to spend his Wednesday with a particularly light schedule. In the morning, he welcomed Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides to the Oval Office.
This gave me and my other colleagues who were pooling that day a chance to shout questions at Biden about an unfortunate remark he’d made the night before, when he appeared to refer to supporters of former president Donald Trump as “garbage.”
Biden had issued a post to X (formerly Twitter) clarifying his gaffe, because it was quickly gaining traction in the news media and risked overshadowing a triumphant campaign stop by Harris in Washington that same evening. (The White House says he was only referring to a comedian who’d sparked outrage by calling Puerto Rico, an American territory, a “floating island of garbage.”) So the president didn’t engage with us when we started shouting questions, and we were quickly ushered out of the Oval Office.
Biden’s reluctance to engage wasn’t exactly a surprise. He’s been kept off the campaign trail for the most part because he’s remarkably unpopular, with approval ratings hovering in the high 30 percent range.
In the hours following the president’s gaffe, The Independent reached out to several Democratic operatives and strategists to gauge whether it would have any impact on the race. One Harris campaign staffer responded with a GIF of The Simpsons character Sideshow Bob repeatedly stepping on rakes and receiving blows to the face as a result. Another longtime Democratic campaign professional responded with another GIF depicting Trump himself saying “no.”
But among Harris insiders — many of whom were once Biden insiders — the octogenarian chief executive’s inability to stay on-message and avoid damaging Harris’s campaign is a sad denouement for a man who has spent his entire life in the service of his country, only to see his abilities falter to the point where he simply could not compete again for the office he’d sought his entire adult life.
Biden wasn’t on the campaign trail much in those early days of Harris momentum. But the White House has refused to consider pulling the president off the trail in these final days. Instead, he’s been dispatched to his hometown of Scranton and to the all-important Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia. Nevertheless, everybody is clearly afraid of risking another gaffe.
So when I was summoned for the only other public event on Biden’s schedule yesterday, I found it unsurprising that it was one where he would neither have the opportunity to take questions nor speak publicly.
Accompanied by First Lady Jill Biden, the president spent roughly an hour handing out candy to children at the White House’s annual Halloween celebration. Put on by the East Wing, it was a light-hearted trick-or-treating event that included a host of costumed characters including Darth Vader and a pair of Star Wars stormtroopers, Lilo and Stitch (of Disney fame), and Barney, the large purple dinosaur who was a ubiquitous presence in the childhoods of some millennials (and a nightmare for their parents).
There were ghosts, goblins, witches and wizards making their way through the South Lawn. Even the First Lady got into the spirit of the holiday by dressing as a panda in a nod to the recent arrival of two such cuddly creatures at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo earlier this month. At one point, the president playfully bit the leg of a child dressed up like a turkey.
It was all very sweet, and in its own way heartwarming, even if the country was descending into harsh rhetoric and divisiveness in the background.
But for anxious Democrats and the seasoned professionals who’ve decamped from Team Biden to Team Harris for this unprecedented election, the scariest thing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was the 81-year-old in a perfectly pressed blue suit.
