Ramesh Ponnuru, Columnist

Journalists Should Stop Cleaning Up After Biden

It’s not the press’s job to make excuses for a candidate’s mistakes, but that’s a benefit the Democrat is too often receiving.

Play it straight.

Photographer: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Lock
This article is for subscribers only.

All political candidates make mistakes. They have to retract hasty, ill-considered statements. They find that the position they took to win their primaries is inconvenient afterward, and try to explain it away. For a lucky few candidates, the embarrassment is mitigated by the assistance of journalists who accept the explanations or, even better, don’t ask for them in the first place.

Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee for president, is in that enviable position. Whenever he makes a political mess, he is blessed with people, many of them not in his employ, who will clean it up for him.