What Do People Do All Day? is a picture book by Richard Scarry from 1968. The Norman Rockwell of the under-fives, Scarry excelled at depicting typical scenes of American life in the typically American town of Busytown. There, as everywhere in the nation, a leopard gives a dental exam to a seal, a beaver digs for coal, a fox sells a house to a rabbit, and a pig is winched through a train window after pigging out in the buffet car.
“Everyone is a worker” in Busytown. But that was in 1968, when college football star Joe Biden was receiving his five draft deferments for asthma that had troubled him when he was a high school football star and magically cured itself around the time the Vietnam War ended. If Scarry were around today, he might perform a public service by writing What Does Joe Biden Do All Day?
This president is missing in inaction. The day-to-day actions required of any head of state are that they can walk and talk simultaneously without falling over in front of the cameras. It’s not much to ask. Ronald Reagan managed it while in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. Elizabeth II does it, and she’s so old that, on paper anyway, she makes Biden a spring chicken and Dr. Jill a perky med school grad with a brilliant career ahead of her. But Biden is the kind of man who, given a low bar, will trip up and plant his face on it. He has, as failures do, fallen upward. This is certainly an indictment of the Democratic Party, and it is a national embarrassment, too.
The worst is that Biden the Incredible Shrinking President has fallen from view. We are deep into a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine. Tensions with China over Taiwan have reached an unprecedented pitch, not least because Biden has three times flapped his jaw about fighting to defend Taiwan, thus making a mockery of the doctrine of strategic ambiguity along with much else. The economy is crashing and taking Biden’s numbers with it. Gas and food are extortionate, baby formula is running out, and mass shootings are on the rise.
This is not the time to take a long weekend in Delaware. This is the moment for Biden to take to the mic like Hunter Biden to the crack pipe. He could roll with some tough punches from Peter Doocy and suggest that yes, he does have the faintest idea of what’s going on, and here’s how we’re going to dig ourselves out of the hole. Instead, Biden is less visible to the public than Vladimir Putin is.
What does he do all day?
The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has the numbers. The press conference as we know it was invented in the Eisenhower presidency. Ike spoke unscripted to the press 193 times in eight years. JFK gave 65 press conferences in just under three years. LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan logged similar numbers. George H.W. Bush gave a gabby 90 in four years. Clinton, Dubya, and Obama were steady performers, too. Donny from Queens gave 35 in 2020-21 alone, though he did have a lot of explaining to do.
In 2020, Biden gave only six press conferences. Reagan gave that many in 1981, the year in which his duties included getting shot and nearly assassinated. With Obama, we got a professorial term report on why we were wrong. With Trump, we got a zany improv on why he was always right. Biden? We get nothing. So far this year, Biden has dared to speak unscripted only twice. The last occasion was on March 24. Perhaps he will grace our screens with his powerful intellect and sparkling repartee before he checks out for the Fourth of July. Perhaps not.
In What Do People Do All Day?, a crew of mice fishermen — fishermice? — take on water in a storm. Luckily, Captain Salty’s cruise ship sails into view and whisks them to safety. There will be no rescue for Biden. The midterm elections will sink the Democrats in Congress like fishermice under a tsunami, and Captain Kamala will lie as low as Lowly Worm. The rats are already preparing to take to the boats, led by Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, who, we hear, will leave after the elections. This presidency is sinking fast. They said it was unthinkable, and now it has thunk.
