Biden press conference to mark start of difficult second year

WASHINGTON (AFP) – President Joe Biden will hold a rare press conference on Wednesday (Jan 19) to kick off his second year in office, with a chance at resetting the agenda ahead of what could be brutal election reversals for Democrats.

This will be Mr Biden’s first press conference of the year – and the first such formal event at all since he travelled to Glasgow at the start of November for the international climate summit.

Mr Biden is likely to face questions on everything from the confrontation with Russia over Ukraine and North Korea’s missile tests to US inflation, Covid-19 and what he calls a threat to democracy from his predecessor Donald Trump.

The event will ignite an intense effort by the White House to spin the calamitous last few weeks into a new narrative focusing on what officials say are Mr Biden’s many, if overlooked, gains during his first year in the Oval Office.

Mr Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters he would lay out how he took over “in incredibly difficult circumstances, fighting a pandemic, a massive economic downturn…(and) that there’s been a lot of progress”.

Ms Psaki, who has borne most of the load in shaping Mr Biden’s message over the last 12 months in her daily briefings, then pulled up graphs, joking: “You know how we love charts around here.”

One showed the economy bouncing back from initial Covid-19 shock, with unemployment down to 3.9 per cent from 6.4 per cent a year ago. Another showed the number of adults fully vaccinated rising from 1 per cent to 74 per cent.

The charts “lay out a pretty stark contrast between where we started and where we are now”, Ms Psaki said.

“Our objective is, and I think you’ll hear the president talk about it tomorrow, is how to build on the foundation.”

Not mentioned were a string of recent setbacks, including the highest inflation in decades and the Supreme Court striking down the administration’s vaccine mandate for large businesses.

The failure by Democrats to use their razor-thin majority in Congress last week to pass another top Biden priority – voting law reforms that he says are needed to protect US democracy – also went unmentioned.

The charts also did not portray the descent in Mr Biden’s approval ratings from around 55 per cent in the early days to just over 42 per cent now.