Biden's Misunderstanding of Empathy

And the media's disinterest in covering it.

I have a more nuanced view than most, I think, of presidential optics in the wake of a natural disaster. I don’t think U.S. presidents should be under immediate public pressure to physically go to the scene. I think they should be focused instead on providing requested federal resources to the local government that’s appropriately in charge of dealing with the rescue and recovery efforts. Sending well wishes is always a good idea, of course, but actually traveling to the disaster area, in nearly every case, only diverts security and other resources that would better be utilized addressing the tragedy at hand.

I frankly wish we could come to a national consensus on this, but that will assuredly never happen due to the nature of our politics.

It’s too tempting for the opposition party to portray the president as cold and heartless, or at best oblivious to the human suffering, if he or she doesn’t jump on a plane lickety-split. And if you happen to be a Republican president, as we saw with Hurricane Katrina, there’s a good chance the media will also aggressively cast you as racist, responsible for every failure at every level of government, and perhaps even suggest you’re to blame for the natural disaster itself (climate change, y’all).

Conversely, if you make the trip, do the photo-ops of you meeting with local leaders and touring the damage, there’s real political value to be gained. Again, there’s rarely any practical value — mostly downside, in fact — but when all that matters are the politics, it’s the smarter play. There’s just one caveat. If you do make the trip, and you meet with victims, it’s important that you demonstrate empathy, and offer words of inspiration and encouragement.

It shouldn’t be that hard, but for Joe Biden, in the year 2023, it clearly is.

Many on the right made hay out of the beach-vacationing president answering “No comment” to a question from the media, almost two weeks ago, about the rising death toll from the Maui wildfires. It was an undoubtedly a weird response from Biden, but I was willing to accept, based on how far away the asking reporter appeared to be, that the 80-year-old hadn’t heard the question properly, or that maybe Biden hadn’t been sufficiently briefed on the issue, and didn’t feel comfortable yet talking about it. It was bad optics either way, but I didn’t think it was worth anyone getting too bent out of shape over.

But a week later, when Biden flew to Hawaii, and went through the post-disaster motions, he said this to survivors of the wildfires:

I don’t want to compare difficulties, but we have a little sense, Jill and I, what it’s like to lose a home. Years ago — now 15 years ago — I was in Washington doing “Meet the Press.” It was a sunny Sunday, and lightning struck at home on a little lake that’s outside of our home — not a lake, a big pond — and hit a wire and came up underneath our home into the heating ducts — the air conditioning ducts. To make a long story short, I almost lost my wife, my ‘67 Corvette, and my cat.

As many have since pointed out, that fire Biden described was small and contained to his kitchen. No one was injured.

Biden’s supposed to be an empathetic guy; many have hailed the trait as one of his greatest assets. But that wasn’t empathy. It wasn’t even sympathy. It was an example of someone taking an enormous tragedy in which a town was destroyed and hundreds of people died, and glibly likening himself to the victims using a comparatively minuscule event. It was the type of self-centered, obliviously insensitive take you’d expect from Michael Scott on The Office, not a real-life U.S. president.

Biden prefaced his next statement with “But all kidding aside,” but what exactly was the joke in the original remarks? The bit about his Corvette and cat? If so, it wasn’t funny.

Perhaps more notable, in regard to both the “No comment” snafu and Biden’s story about his kitchen fire, is that the three major networks had no interest at all in so much as mentioning either on their evening newscasts. Fox News and other right-wing outlets of course did, but does anyone honestly believe that if Biden were a Republican, these incidents wouldn’t have been played, replayed, and discussed at length — probably for days — across the mainstream media? Heck, even the fact that Biden continued his week-long vacation as the tragedy played out would have been a big story.

There are big political advantages that come from the ideological alignment that exists between the Democratic party and much of the press, and this was a particularly obvious example of that. Biden got a pass — a complete benefit of the doubt — on what would have otherwise been considered outragerously offensive behavior by the same people. There were no suggestions of racism, and no charges that he didn’t care about poor people. The focus instead was on Biden’s better moments when meeting with the victims.

Must be nice.