PBS, NPR Boost NAACP Speech By 'Very Engaging' 'Middle-Class Emblem' Joe Biden

July 15th, 2012 4:56 PM

PBS and NPR both praised Vice President Biden's energetic NAACP speech in their Friday weekly roundups. PBS Washington Week host Gwen Ifill said "Joe Biden’s at the top of his game. I saw him jogging off the stage the other day...at the NAACP convention, and he seems to be perfectly fine." Alexis Simendinger of Real Clear Politics said he is "very engaging" and a "middle-class emblem" for Team Obama.

Did these PBS pundits somehow miss Biden the "middle-class emblem" telling the National Council of La Raza that HE is the middle-class when he makes nearly $400,000 a year

Apparently, yes. This is how the pro-Biden chat continued:

SIMENDINGER: Well, talk about story-telling, I would say the Vice President is – he usually tells five stories in one speech, and he’s very engaging when he tells those stories. He is the middle-class emblem that the Obama campaign is happy to send out there, the happy warrior, attacking away. He – surprisingly, for a guy who talks long, he can boil it down into a short bumper-sticker occasionally.

IFILL: Well, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that. (Laughter),

SIMENDINGER: No – bin Laden is dead and GM is alive!

IFILL: That is true, that is his, that is true.

On the domestic news roundup on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR Friday morning, Wall Street Journal reporter Naftali Bendavid was in his usual pro-Obama groove:

BENDAVID: I think that Joe Biden's appearance before the NAACP is worth taking a minute and talking about. For one thing, unlike either Mitt Romney or, really, I thought President Obama in his video message, Biden seemed totally comfortable, totally at home. He gave a stem-winder. He seemed to connect to the audience. And it just remind you how much he does kind of bring to the Obama administration, that you have a president who's seen as being a little bit aloof, and then you have this guy who can go there and seemingly talk to anyone.

There’s only so much you can say, though. When Bendavid noted Obama didn’t go, and wondered out loud on NPR “was his campaign worried about the image of him being wildly cheered by a liberal African-American group?” Rehm shot him down: “You know, the calculations along the road here are just more than I can bear sometimes.”

Rehm couldn’t handle the thought that liberalism could ever be politically damaging.