Here’s What I Would Advise President Biden To Do If I Was His Political Strategist
If I was advising President Biden, here’s what I would tell him:
The speech he gave the day after his disastrous debate showed him at his best. He spoke in a strong voice, did not stumble and looked like he was capable of fulfilling the duties of a President for four more years.
The speech he delivered the night of the Supreme Court’s decision on presidential immunity showed him at his best. He spoke in a strong voice, did not stumble and looked like he was capable of fulfilling the duties of a President for four more years.
I would also tell him that those speeches did him no good
The reason I feel that way is because those speeches were staged. The president read prepared remarks and didn’t have to respond to questions from political opponents or the media that require instant recall about people, places and things. Thus, those speeches had little to no affect of dispelling the image of him during the debate, that is still the subject of TV talk shows and newspaper “hard news” articles, opinion columnists and editorials, as I write this on July 2, and will continue to be discussed and written about until Election Day if he remain the Democratic presidential nominee
During my long career in the PR business, which I joined after being a reporter and editor for several years at New York City dailies and wire services, I trained many corporate and brand executives on how to respond to the media throughout my long tenure as a senior vice president/senior counselor at Burson-Marsteller.I also did so for foreign government officials at B-M, and for American politicians during my first public relations job at
Earle Associates, a boutique PR firm, where my assignments included working on local, statewide, congressional and presidential campaigns.
(It has reported that the president spent several days preparing for the debate and that the former president didn’t. If that’s true, it validates my opinion about media training. It’s highly overrated. There is no comparison of being in a training session, where messing up an answer to a question results in a person being given another opportunity to answer it correctly, and being grilled in a pubic forum by a political opponent or journalists, where no one knows how a question might be framed. That’s why I always limited my media training to providing questions I thought were most likely to be asked and letting the trainee figure out how best to answer them, because that mirrored what the client would have to do in a real life situation, although I always critiqued the answers, giving suggestions on how to improve them and what facts that were not included should be.. However, crisis situations needed a different approach than the normal “meet the press” situations and I would always prepare various answers for spokespeople.)
Here’s what I would tell the president
I would tell the president there is only one way to convince voters that he is still mentally capable of leading the United States and this is what he must do.
He must make himself available to be questioned by journalists on a continual basis by:
Having a series of press conferences with no restrictions on journalists.
By appearing on live TV shows.
By giving one-on-one interviews to both pro-Biden and non-partisan journalists.
By making speeches without reading from a teleprompter before an audience of journalists and permitting them to question him after the speeches.
Answering questions from local media after making a speech at his rallies.
Holding a series of Town Hall forums.
If the president can show during those appearances that he is spontaneous, energetic and can answer questions without fumbling, that would go a long way convincing the public that his debate performance can be dismissed as his having a bad night. Staged public appearances reading from a teleprompter will not.
If President Biden is the Democratic nominee for re-election, other tactics will be needed in addition to the above. But that’s the subject for another column.
