Anybody checked what Joe Biden is reading these days, what with all those vacays on the Delaware beaches?
My former colleagues at Issues & Insights did, and ewwww, it doesn't look good:
Time was when the elite media class obsessed over how many and what books presidents read. But since President Joe Biden took office, they’ve completely lost interest. Do they know something we don’t?
Before Biden, the press loved to ask presidents about their favorite books. What’s on their nightstand? What are they reading on vacation? It has always been treated as a sign of intelligence. A measure of sophistication.
The Daily Beast once compared presidential reading habits to how historians ranked them as presidents. “The results are not surprising—the top-ranked presidents all made our list near the top of presidential readers,” it reported.
The press lavished praise on Barack Obama and Bill Clinton for their book-reading habits. When Clinton was running in 1992, for example, the New York Times reported glowingly that he was “an omnivorous reader.” Obama’s summer reading list was treated as front-page news.
And Joe Biden?
So, out of curiosity, we looked for articles about Biden’s reading habits. And found almost nothing, except articles in book-lovers websites.
During the 2020 primaries, for example, Book Riot asked all the Democratic candidates to list their favorite books. Most of them responded. Even Kamala Harris was able to name five. But Biden?
“Biden’s team never responded to numerous inquiries and followups about his favorite/most influential books. There’s very little readily available about Biden’s favorite books,” it noted.
If there was any doubt that the guy doesn't read, this piece will lay that doubt to rest. Biden doesn't read.
That was what I suspected a couple of years back, when he provided the blurb, based on a Rolling Stone interview, to former Trump administration NSC advisor Fiona Hill's long, heavy-lumber, heavily footnoted, academic book, called "Mr. Putin," co-written with Clifford Gaddy in 2013.
Based on Joe Biden's reading habits, the blurb looked more like a political favor than an indicator of Joe Biden being a sophisticated reader. I wrote about that here and here.
After reading all the extensive exploration about Biden's reading record, and academic record, too, in the Issues & Insights piece, I have no doubt Biden doesn't read books. Not the guy who whispers, yawps, creeps on little girls, can't keep names straight, and falls asleep in meetings. How could Biden get through a book like Fiona Hill's, with all those long, complicated, sound-alike Russian names and tangled relationships?
Nope, I don't think Biden reads, not after reading all the evidence presented in that I&I piece.
Image: Screen shot from The Independent video, via YouTube