President Biden will finally hold his first press conference on March 25, according to the White House.
It will bring and end to weeks of questions about why he is the first president in a century not to hold a solo question-and-answer session in his first 50 days. And it comes as analysts warned that the delay only raised expectations and the risk of an embarrassing “gotcha” moment.
Officials defended his actions, saying he took questions more than 40 times in other settings and that he had been focused on the pandemic response.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki made the announcement on Tuesday during a trip with Biden to Pennsylvania. “President Biden will hold a formal press conference on the afternoon of Thursday, March 25,” she said.
By the 50-day mark (reached last week), Former President George H.W. Bush had held five press conferences, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton five, Bill Clinton four, George W. Bush three, and Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan two, according to a study by Martha Kumar, a presidential scholar and professor emeritus at Towson University.
NO BIDEN PRESS CONFERENCE LEADS TO QUESTIONS ABOUT TRANSPARENCY
The delay suggests a White House communications strategy built around media set pieces to mark policy victories that limit unforced errors from a politician perceived as prone to verbal stumbles.
Kumar said presidential staffs tend to be risk-averse, focused on potential problems rather than the benefits of news conferences — such as offering a direct way to sell the president to the public and an opportunity to brief him on all aspects of his administration.
“Staff think about the risk,” she said. “They don’t think about the rewards.”
Harold Holzer, author of The Presidents vs. the Press, said the approach seemed to be taken from Reagan’s playbook, another aging leader with a reputation for missteps.
However, he added that the delay raised the level of risk.
“When it builds to this level of expectation, it is not going to end well. The press will get irritated, and they will look to find a mistake or a misstatement,” he said.
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“But Biden is really good at this,” Holzer said. “He became president. … I think he’ll be fine.”
