Joe Biden and the Bunker Presidency
The mainstream news industry will regret selling its soul for Biden.
by Rob Crisell
November 14, 2020, 12:04 AM
If you liked the basement campaign, you’re going to love the bunker presidency.
This year’s presidential election showed that slightly more than half of America no longer wants a president who speaks to them openly and often. They don’t want a chief executive who tweets, regularly takes contentious interviews, routinely answers questions from hostile reporters, and does freestyle stand-up at his boisterous rallies.
Reporters have been grumbling about Biden’s inaccessibility since the day he won the Democratic nomination.
Instead, they want a fragile, cosseted figurehead — a museum piece — who gives few speeches (all shopworn and canned), avoids tough questions from the press, and utters nothing without a teleprompter. They want T. S. Eliot’s hollow man, a headpiece filled with straw. They want a basement candidate who will be a bunker president. They want Joe Biden.
To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, it looks like the people will get what they want, good and hard.
The mainstream news industry is the group that worked the hardest to get Biden elected, all while rabidly tearing down Donald Trump for the last five years. The 78-year-old career politician would never have gotten within sniffing distance of the presidency without their tireless help. Even before COVID propelled him into his basement like a sack of Irish potatoes, Biden’s cognitive decline had deprived him of his once-famed ability to speak coherently and spontaneously. The Fourth Estate had to cash in all its moral and political capital to shield their man from scrutiny, especially about his past and present scandals. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter did their part, censoring or suppressing news stories that reflected badly on Biden and the Democrats.
The self-proclaimed president-elect is about to become the most protected, most scripted, most inaccessible man to hold the office since Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a debilitating stroke in the latter half of his second term.
Biden’s first appearance on October 9 — just after the news media had anointed him as president — gives us an idea of how he will handle the press going forward. He spoke for 10 minutes from a teleprompter, answered a few softball questions from pre-screened reporters about Trump’s refusal to concede, and then shuffled off the stage.
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https://spectator.org/joe-biden-basement-bunker-presidency/
