Wow: NY Times Reporter Reveals Tactics He Uses to Be Able to Hear What Joe Biden Is Mumbling

One of the most important things an elected official needs to be able to do is communicate clearly, coherently, and firmly enough (without yelling) so the folks sitting in the cheap seats can hear what they have to say whether they have a microphone or not.

Politicians and candidates for public office, of course, are oftentimes intentionally vague when they speak, giving themselves just enough wiggle room for plausible deniability in case they get out over their skis. In other instances, however, you have those who genuinely want to be able to fully get their message across but who fall short because being able to captivate an audience is just not their strong suit.

In the case of President Joe Biden, though, he's just a hot mess all the way around, not just because he's never really been an effective communicator but also because it's pretty clear he's not the guy running the show anymore (if he ever has) for reasons that should be obvious to most everyone at this point.

All of this brings me to the latest column from the leftist New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Unlike the other liberal writers on their roster, Dowd has periodically been critical of Joe Biden over his decades in public office, with one of the more notable examples being when she called him out in July 2023 over his failure at the time to acknowledge his granddaughter, Navy Roberts.

More recently, she implored Biden in her own way to step aside in the presidential race. But it was in her most recent column on Biden that something slipped out about a colleague of hers on the news side, White House correspondent Peter Baker, and the tactics he told her he needed to use in order to be able to hear Joe Biden when he speaks:

Also, he’s more slurry now, so words get smushed together, and words and thoughts collide; words get dropped, caesuras skipped, and sentences sometimes trail off into the ether.
The Times’s chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker, told me he has started using translation headsets on overseas trips, even when he is 20 feet away from the president, because they offer a magnified volume when Biden starts to mumble.

An American New York Times reporter now requires translator technology to decipher what the president is saying IN ENGLISH. pic.twitter.com/x0f8gEXfO5
— Eddie Scarry (@eScarry) July 8, 2024

For any Democrat reading that and thinking that Baker must be a "MAGA-friendly" reporter, I can assure you he's most certainly not. Not only does he have an anti-Trump book under his belt but he frequently peppers his Twitter feed with story teasers like this one:

One party has a candidate who is really old and showing it. The other has a candidate who is a convicted felon, adjudicated sexual abuser, business fraudster and self-described aspiring dictator for a day. And also really old. One party wants to replace its candidate. The other…
— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) July 5, 2024

So no, he's not a shill for Trump or Republicans by a long shot. Further, that column has been out for three days now, and he's had plenty of chances to deny or clarify what Dowd wrote about what she says he told her - but hasn't.

Reporters having to use translation headsets to be able to hear and try to understand the purported leader of the free world is something I never saw coming. And yet here we are.

A president needs to be heard and understood because everything they say has the potential to impact millions of people positively or negatively for generations to come. The inability of some in the press corp to no longer be able to hear or understand what Biden is saying is yet another on a long list of reasons why he never should have run in the first place.

And a scarier thought is that if reporters are no longer able to understand him, that tells you that those in his inner circle don't, either, which better explains that explosive WSJ report on just how far his handlers have taken it in their quest to hide from voters what has been clear about Biden from the very start.