It’s been easy to forget about Joe Biden. After all, it’s been weeks since he last participated in a presidential debate or has even been able to hold a campaign event. When he has appeared in television interviews from isolation at home, the former vice president has often seemed like an afterthought, given the onslaught of news about the coronavirus epidemic.
It makes sense that given the spread of the virus and its crippling effect on the economy, that public attention has focused on learning the latest information about when and how there could be a way out.
Biden himself has argued that his own campaign has benefited from the focus on President Trump. Asked by an ABC affiliate about how the pandemic has hurt his campaign given that Trump gets to command daily press briefings while Biden has been marginalized, he said that actually, “Based on the polling data, it’s helped me. The more he speaks, the more my numbers go up. I’m not being facetious.”
It’s certainly understandable that at this time, briefings involving public health officials and Trump will be dominating the political conversation since they are setting current policy. Much of the political debate is inevitably about Trump’s performance during the crisis. Biden may be holding out hope that this will allow him to remain under the radar and avoid the frequent gaffes that have defined his political career, and that now only serve to highlight his advanced age.
But news media should not lose sight of the fact that, with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders out of the race, Biden is now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. And as a major party nominee who has a good shot of becoming the next occupier of the White House, he deserves the sort of scrutiny that comes with it.
Unfortunately, Biden has too often been treated with kid gloves, being granted softball interviews that don’t challenge his statements and mainly seemed designed to goad him into attacking Trump’s performance.
NBC’s Chuck Todd asked Biden whether Trump has “blood on his hands,” which to Biden’s credit, he said was “too harsh” an assessment.
CNN’s Brooke Baldwin has asked Biden if Trump has been “intentionally” misleading. She then fawned, “Your strength, really, your strength is in traveling around the country and connecting with people, right? Connecting with voters, looking them in the eye, a hug, a handshake, especially in these crucial months before the election, and you can’t do any of that right now.” She added, “Mr. Vice President, does that worry you?”
Biden could be challenged on a number of fronts. He claimed, falsely, that Trump had wiped out Obama-era increases to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. He claimed falsely that there was no effort by the Trump administration to get American medical experts into China. He also ran a campaign video claiming, falsely, that a top CDC official was “silenced.” When Trump imposed a travel restriction on China in late January, Biden also said, “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysterical xenophobia and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.”
It’s inevitable that Trump’s response to the coronavirus is going to be the leading political news story as long as the crisis lasts. But media need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, not shirk their duty to scrutinize the man seeking to replace Trump nine months from now.
