With a few softly spoken sentences and a slick oratorical style honed by decades of practice, President Biden has members of the press in raptures over his empathy.
“It is hard to imagine any other contemporary politician making the speech JOE BIDEN did Thursday night — both channeling our collective sorrow and reminding us that there is life after grief,” declared Politico Playbook.
Denying the president used his speech as an opportunity to take a victory lap (he did), the Washington Post reports he instead mixed “empathy with hard realities.”
“Mr. Biden sought to balance empathy for more than 529,000 lives lost with the deep yearning among Americans for an end to the crisis,” reports the New York Times.
There is no easier mark, no audience more eager for performative shows of comfort and empathy than the supposedly hard-boiled members of our vaunted, self-important Fourth Estate. If anyone knows this, it’s the guy who has been in Washington since before many of them were even born.
“While [the pandemic] was different for everyone,” Biden practically whispered Thursday evening during his first national address as president, “we all lost something — a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us.”
He continued, affecting the same studied delivery that endeared former President Bill Clinton to voters in the 1990s.
“I know it’s been hard,” Biden said ever-so-solemnly. “I truly know. As I’ve told you before, I carry a card in my pocket with the number of Americans who have died from COVID to date. It’s on the back of my schedule.”
He added, “They were husbands, wives, sons and daughters, grandparents, friends, neighbors, young and old. They leave behind loved ones, unable to truly grieve or to heal, even to have a funeral.”
Speaking of people being unable to hold funerals for their loved ones, now is a good time to remind everyone that Biden was the one who said during the 2020 election that he’d shut down the entire country to fight the pandemic if “the scientists” recommended it.
“You lost your job, you closed your business, facing eviction, homelessness, hunger, a loss of control,” Biden said. “Maybe worst of all, a loss of hope. Watching a generation of children who may be set back up to a year or more because they’ve not been in school because of their loss of learning.”
Following the president’s speech, members of the press pulled themselves together enough to marvel at the president’s awe-inspiring empathy.
“What was notable about the speech,” said CNN White House correspondent John Harwood, “was the appeal to universal values. It was striking in the way that the president conveys empathy in unadorned language, trying to appeal to the common experiences that all Americans have been missing.”
Said his colleague, chief national affairs correspondent Jeff Zeleny, “President Biden, yet again, doesn’t tip-toe around a nation’s collective grief. He confronts it head-on in a seldom-heard moment of presidential empathy.”
Biden’s empathy, said MSNBC’s Joy Reid, “is like his superpower.” Her colleague, Rachel Maddow, concurred that the “president is very good at articulating empathy.”
I swear, sometimes it seems as if these people want nothing more than to be swaddled by a politician and rocked to sleep.
Never mind that Biden unfairly took all the credit for the accomplishments of Operation Warp Speed. Never mind that Biden lied when he claimed the Trump administration was silent during the first months of the pandemic (the Trump administration took steps to ameliorate the crisis as early as January 2020). Never mind that Biden invented nonexistent critics who, he claims, said his goal of 100 million vaccinations in the first 100 days of his presidency was “over the top.”
No time to dwell on such details. Did you see how empathetic Biden was?
