The White House hosted Halloween festivities this week, which included President Joe Biden handing out candy to trick-or-treaters for about an hour and a half. At one point, a small child handed Biden a toy ice cream cone, and as the conservative Washington Examiner noted, “the president playfully put a cone in his mouth, pretending to eat it.”
It was, in other words, a brief, lighthearted moment, in which Biden had a little fun interacting with a child visiting the White House. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be worth mentioning, but the Republican National Committee highlighted the interaction via social media — as if it made the Democrat look bad.
Biden grabs a taste of a child's fake ice cream cone pic.twitter.com/EtvgbHxI5y
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) October 30, 2023
Why in the world would the RNC see this as problematic for Biden? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. Perhaps the public is supposed to believe that the president mistook a fake ice cream cone for a real one — though the accompanying video clip clearly shows otherwise.
This comes on the heels of the RNC using the same social-media account to highlight an interview in which Biden said he was able to convince the late-Sen. Strom Thurmond “to vote for the Voting Rights Act.” The Republican National Committee assumed the claim was absurd because the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, years before Biden was elected to the Senate.
What the RNC neglected to realize is that the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized several times in the years that followed, which was what Biden was obviously referring to.
A month earlier, the RNC used this same account to, for reasons unknown, suggest there was something wrong with the president petting a dog in Hawaii. White House spokesperson Andrew Bates jokingly told The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank soon after, “I’m just coming to grips with the fact that I work for a dog-petting monster.”
The column went on to note that the RNC has published a variety of other items about Biden’s interactions with dogs — none of which seemed especially interesting — as well as a surprising number of social-media messages related to the president and ice cream. Why does this matter? The more items I see from the RNC account, the more I find myself asking the same question Milbank asked: Maybe this helps build the public impression that Biden is non compos mentis, but the RNC is also inadvertently fueling a rather different impression: This is the best it’s got?
Exactly. The Republican National Committee’s online account intends to expose “the lies, hypocrisy, and failed far-left policies of Joe Biden.” It’s against this backdrop that the RNC has made a powerful case that the president likes dogs, ice cream, and joking around with children. If Biden were nearly as bad as his partisan critics like to suggest, wouldn’t the RNC’s account have better content?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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