MANCHESTER, N.H. — Campaigning for president in the small states with early primaries is supposed to be retail politicking, but gaffe-prone 2020 front-runner Joe Biden’s handlers are leaving nothing to chance, deploying a teleprompter to help him stay on message.
Appearing in here in Manchester, N.H., before a crowd of 400, Biden’s people rolled out a teleprompter despite the relative intimacy of the gathering.
But it turns out, he used the teleprompter more as a stump speech outline rather than a script. At some points, the prompter operator struggled to find which point he was supposed to hit next while Biden threw in an anecdote or mused about President Trump’s poor relationships with foreign leaders.
Another fail-safe anti-gaffe strategy: Speak less.
Several times, Biden stopped himself from talking too long about a particular topic. “I could go on, but I won’t,” he said in at a pizza shop Hampton, N.H., Monday while talking about the potential of the United States. “I’m sorry to go on,” he said at another point.
[Related: Byron York: Joe Biden and restoring the old (pre-Trump) order]
Nevertheless, throughout his first campaign trip through New Hampshire Monday and Tuesday, Biden made himself accessible to attendees at campaign events while successfully avoiding gaffes and missteps. Biden spoke at the Hampton event without notes and answered a half-dozen questions from the audience.
Things weren’t always smooth sailing.
Someone in Hampton knocked over and broke a glass while those in the mob of attendees and the press moved tables and stood on chairs to get a glimpse of Biden as he pressed the flesh for 40 minutes. His staffers remained close by through the ruckus, collecting notes and gifts that attendees brought to give to Biden and taking down their contact info so his campaign could follow up on questions. They did not appear to intervene between Biden and attendees, besides helping to clear pathways and keeping the candidate on schedule.
Biden’s composure is a change from missteps in his previous bids for president. When he launched his 2008 presidential campaign, he immediately faced scrutiny for calling Barack Obama “the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”
[Also read: Biden brags about his time in ‘the hood’]
During his run in the 1988 cycle, Biden said that he was smarter than a voter.
“I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do, I suspect,” Biden said in response to a question about where he went to law school and where he placed in his class. Biden noted that he went to law school on a full academic scholarship.
Biden has also avoided inappropriate contact with women following outrage after at least eight women came forward in the weeks before he launched his campaign with complaints of unwanted grasping by Biden. He did not touch his forehead to those of supporters when talking to him. But a few women at a campaign stop in Nashua, N.H., on Tuesday reached out to hug Biden and whispered comments in his ear not audible to those surrounding them.
Biden is aware of intense media scrutiny of his every word. On Monday, he joked about one of his famous gaffes in 2010 when a hot mic caught him telling Obama that signing the Affordable Care Act was a “big f—ing deal.”
“I thought no one could hear,” Biden said in Hampton. “Thank God my mom wasn’t around.”
