It is only fitting that a media that ushered in the Biden presidency with an obvious fiction would see it off with another.
President Biden, who until last June was shielded by a news media complicit in the fantasy that he was physically and mentally fit to serve as president, delivered his farewell address on Jan. 15.
Unsurprisingly, the speech was a cliché-laden mess, littered liberally with clumsily cribbed bits of speeches delivered by presidents far more capable, beloved and consequential than himself. It was a bad speech.
You’d never know this from listening to the coverage. If you get your news from the people who until recently insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack,” you’d never know that his pitiful, final wheeze was a 100 percent forgettable dud.
Indeed, the industry that told you Biden was up to the rigors of the presidency thinks his farewell address was a masterstroke in statesmanship.
“In some ways, this builds on the message, the themes we’ve always heard from him that he is fighting for the soul of this nation,” effused NBC News’s Kristen Welker, calling it a “speech for the history books.”
At ABC News, the address was described as a “defense of democracy,” with ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Mary Bruce characterizing it as a “challenge” to “Americans and the nation to carry [Biden’s] work forward.”
“He underscored the importance of American democracy and the need to protect it,” she added.
At CBS, the address was characterized as “striking,” “extraordinary” and “deeply personal.” John Adams was evoked.
Ed O’Keefe wondered whether Biden would be compared “alongside Franklin Roosevelt and LBJ and George Washington in terms of great presidents who did big things or does he end up in the conversation with Woodrow Wilson and James Garfield and John Kennedy of if they had lived longer, if they had been healthy enough, if they had been able to do more, how would we have assessed them.”
CBS’s Robert Costa took the opportunity to promote Biden’s carefully curated but entirely fictitious “everyman” image. He invoked the ridiculous trope of Biden as “‘Scranton Joe,’ as someone who was an advocate for working people.”
At CNN, the headline was this: “Biden’s poignant farewell dwells on his fears for the country he loves.”
One could be forgiven for questioning whether these people watched the same speech as the rest of us. Objectively, it was just a lousy speech. But don’t take my word for it.
“[W]e know the idea of America, our institution, our people, our values that uphold it, are constantly being tested,” the president mumbled as he squinted and stumbled his way through the text. “Ongoing debates about power and the exercise of power. About whether we lead by the example of our power or the power of our example.”
Goodness — that last line is painful to read. The White House speechwriters that haven’t quit already must have been spending all their working hours on their résumés.
Biden, who two weeks ago awarded multibillionaire currency speculator and Democratic bankroller George Soros with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, warned against “dark money” in politics. Biden, whose son Hunter oversaw an international influence peddling operation that won Hunter a $50,000-per-month Ukrainian energy gig for which he had no qualifications, complained of a shadowy cabal of influential oligarchs. Biden, whose same son was recently convicted of tax evasion, also expounded upon how important it is that the rich “pay their fair share of taxes.”
It was all prime Biden: full of bluster, hypocrisy, unearned confidence and things already said by better men.
The self-serving and delusional speech played up nonexistent accomplishments, ignored obvious failures and tried to take credit for things that had not yet happened. Worse, it was utterly forgettable.
In addition to talking up a bad speech, many in the media weirdly omitted key context from their reactions. For all the focus on Biden’s warnings about “tech oligarchs” and “dark money,” none of the analyses or responses noted that the Democratic Party, and Biden specifically, benefit enormously from billionaire “dark money.” More billionaires and outside groups donated to Democratic presidential candidates in 2016, 2020 and 2024 than contributed to the Republican candidate.
In their discussion of Biden’s warnings regarding “tech oligarchs,” mentions of the Obama-Biden campaign’s use of Facebook data for voter outreach were also conspicuously absent. This is odd, considering the Obama-Biden-Facebook relationship was once praised as the future of political strategy campaigns, the toast of political commentary everywhere.
In his last week in office, a forgetful Biden delivered a forgettable farewell address, proving again that he doesn’t have the stuff to be president — if he ever had it.
Becket Adams is program director of the National Journalism Center.
