Who Wants to Host a Biden Speech?

Some issues are just too important to be left to an unscripted Joe Biden. This is not CNN and your humble correspondent is not a doctor so this column will not be offering a long-distance diagnosis of the president’s mental health or an assessment of how his cognition compares to that of other world leaders. But these are dangerous times and we would all be much safer if Mr. Biden would make greater use of prepared statements on subjects such as, for example, weapons of mass destruction.

Two months after a bumbling press conference in which Mr. Biden implied that a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine might be tolerable to the U.S. and its allies, the President flew to Europe this week and somehow ended up taking questions from reporters at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

Readers may recall that frightening Brussels misadventure in presidential communication as the time when the national security adviser had to clarify after Mr. Biden’s comments that “the United States has no intention of using chemical weapons, period, under any circumstances.”

Phew! In the months since, the Biden administration has successfully avoided firing off any chemical weapons, or even rhetorical suggestions that it might. But now as candidates campaign for November’s elections, a striking number of members of the president’s own party don’t seem to trust him with public messages of any kind.

Matt Viser reports on Mr. Biden for the Washington Post:

He goes largely unnamed on Democratic campaign websites and Twitter accounts. And candidates in key races in battleground states are either not asking him to come — or actively avoiding him when he does, according to a Washington Post survey of more than 60 candidates in the most competitive gubernatorial, U.S. Senate and congressional campaigns in the country.

Few candidates said they wanted Biden to campaign for them in their state or district, with many not responding to the question at all.

They don’t want the President showing up to speak for them at all? Mr. Viser shares some of the responses to his queries on potential presidential visits:

“No comment from the campaign at this time,” said a spokeswoman for Sen.

Michael F. Bennet

(D-Colo.), who is a Republican target in a state that Biden won by more than 13 points.

“We have not asked President Biden or VP Harris to campaign in Ohio and have no plans to do so,” said a spokeswoman for Rep.

Tim Ryan

(D-Ohio), who is the Democratic nominee in a tight U.S. Senate race. Pointing to a range of surrogates for Republican nominee J.D. Vance, the spokeswoman, Izzi Levy, added, “Tim has been very clear that he wants to be the face of this campaign, and that’s not changing anytime soon.”

Several Democratic candidates didn’t say they were opposed to Biden appearing with them in their states. But they weren’t exactly warmly embracing the idea, either.

“Well, I mean, I welcome anybody to come to Arizona and let me, you know, show them around the state and, you know, the issues that we’re facing,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) said when asked if he wanted Biden to campaign with him. “So, yeah, I mean, it doesn’t, doesn’t matter who it is.”

So he’s saying there’s a chance! More specifically Mr. Kelly seems willing to extend to Mr. Biden the same privileges he’s willing to extend to any other human being seeking to visit Arizona.

But other Democrats seem prepared to offer Mr. Biden a below-average welcome. Mr. Viser reports:

Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who is running for reelection in a district that Trump carried in 2020, recently took out an ad in which he says, “I was the only Democrat to vote against trillions of dollars of President Biden’s agenda because I knew it would make inflation worse.”

[Rep. Marcy] Kaptur, the Ohio congresswoman who has held her seat for nearly four decades and is the longest-serving woman in the House, is running a new ad in which she explicitly blames Biden for “letting Ohio solar manufacturers be undercut by China” and touts how she is working with Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).

“

Marcy Kaptur

: She doesn’t work for Joe Biden,” the ad says. “She works for you.”

Over at Reuters, Jarrett Renshaw and Trevor Hunnicutt are finding the same political phenomenon:

U.S. President Joe Biden launches a coast-to-coast tour this week to tout the new climate and tax bill and boost Democrats running in November’s elections. But when he arrives, some of those candidates may be nowhere in sight, fearing Biden is too much of a liability.

Democrats hope the trip will boost the president’s poor poll numbers and draw attention to his achievements. But some candidates for Congress worry that campaigning with Biden will hurt them in the Nov. 8 election, according to more than a dozen interviews with senior Democrats and local campaign officials in battleground states including Pennsylvania and Arizona.

Was it something he said?

Midterm elections tend to be rough on the party in power and often a referendum on the president. Given the president’s weak approval ratings it’s perhaps not surprising that Democrats think they’ll be better off if Mr. Biden doesn’t show up to speak while they try to carve out public identities independent of him. But in the Post opinion section Henry Olsen writes on recent history suggesting that Mr. Biden will still be an anchor:

There’s a growing belief, based on state polling and a perception that Republicans have nominated an unusually poor slate of candidates in swing states, that Democratic Senate candidates can significantly outrun President Biden’s feeble job approval ratings and thereby keep control of the chamber. It’s not impossible, but the bulk of polling evidence from the last four cycles shows that’s it’s very unlikely…

In 2014, longtime Democratic senators ran as much as nine points ahead of President Obama’s job approval in their state, but most still lost despite significantly outrunning the president. No Democrat in a contested race ran more than five points ahead of Obama’s job approval rating in 2016.

Partisanship increased even more in the Trump era. Nine Republican candidates in the 16 most contested Senate races in 2018 and 2020 ran within just two points of Trump’s job approval. Another four ran within three or four points. Only two GOP nominees ran 10 or more points ahead or behind Trump’s job approval: Maine’s

Susan Collins

(+10) and West Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey, who ran 17 points behind Trump’s job approval in his state against Sen.

Joe Manchin III.

These data strongly suggest that the fate of this year’s Democratic Senate nominees, like those in years past, is tied to the president’s job approval.

There’s not much more to say.

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This column will not publish on Tuesday but will return on Wednesday.

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Mr. Freeman will host “WSJ at Large” Friday at 7:30 p.m. EDT on the Fox Business Network. The program repeats at 9:30 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. EDT on Saturday and Sunday.

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James Freeman is the co-author of “The Cost: Trump, China and American Revival.”

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Follow James Freeman on Twitter.

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(Teresa Vozzo helps compile Best of the Web.)