MSNBC and CNBC founder Tom Rogers on Monday expressed fear about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden and his “worrisome inability to focus his message” ahead of the Nov. 3 election against President Trump.
Mr. Rogers, who is now editor-at-large at Newsweek, wrote a column Monday saying Mr. Biden must learn how to coherently speak off-script before jumping back into the media spotlight after spending weeks in isolation during the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Rogers wrote that Mr. Biden’s multiple media appearances shot from the former vice president’s home had “unfortunately shown a worrisome inability to focus his message and articulate clearly and crisply.”
“Biden’s television appearances — consisting mostly of softball interviews (outside of those dealing with the sexual harassment allegations) that ask for his critique of the president’s leadership during the pandemic — have been way below an acceptable level for somebody who is leading the charge in perhaps the most important election of our lifetime,” Mr. Rogers wrote.
“When Biden is talking with a teleprompter, he commands the situation much better than Trump,” he continued. “But in his living room media appearances so far, he stumbles, fails to complete sentences, searches for words, repeats the same points, has difficulty hitting the right points and does not take points to a deeper level, making his comments seem overly general and superficial.”
“If Biden’s speaking does not improve, it will play into the most obvious critiques of his candidacy,” he wrote. “The Trump campaign will go after Biden as an establishment politician of the Washington, D.C., ‘swamp,’ who therefore talks in ‘political speak’; or it will characterize him as ‘confused,’ and therefore standing for nothing; or it will paint him as ‘too old’ to handle the job.”
Mr. Rogers declared there it “nothing more urgent” for the campaign to address than to improve Mr. Biden’s unscripted speaking.
“As we move toward Election Day, Biden will no longer be able to let Trump do the talking,” he wrote. “He will have to come out and present the case against Trump himself, as well as his vision for the future.
“So, this is a message to Biden’s campaign staff: Figure out how to fix this issue, and fix it quickly,” he concluded, in part. “Trump is no leader, but you can’t lead without communicating effectively, and right now, Joe Biden is not doing that.”
