Biden’s highly choreographed ‘big boy’ presser wasn’t enough to reassure wobbly Democrats

The last time Joe Biden made even a token effort to appear as if he was taking questions from the entire White House press corps was 610 days ago, just days after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and ended his party’s unified control over Washington.

Standing in the White House’s State Dining Room, Biden kept to a list of reporters chosen by his aides and held forth for just under an hour, answering questions from eight reporters on topics as varied as Russia’s war against Ukraine, the impact of Democrats’ loss of the House of Representatives, and his plans to run for a second term.

Nearly two years later, with numerous members of his party calling for him to stand aside from his re-election in the wake of his dismal debate performance against Donald Trump last month, Biden and his aides pinned their hopes on another press conference to convince doubters of his continued fitness for office.

At the close of the NATO summit in Washington, it was announced last week that Biden would hold what one reporter from Bloomberg News jokingly dubbed a “big boy news conference,” in comparison to the smaller “two and two” sessions he sometimes holds with foreign leaders.

The highly-touted question-and-answer session was meant to prove that Biden is still up to the rigors of a campaign by holding the sort of freewheeling back-and-forth with reporters that Trump engaged in on multiple occasions, rather than the more controlled and stage-managed interactions that have characterized his presidency.

That goal was under threat even as Biden prepared to take the stage, as he’d made a significant verbal blunder just hours earlier when he mixed up the names of two leaders who could never be mistaken for each other,