It was a tough day for Joe Biden at the Easter Egg roll on Monday.
As we saw, he was ordered around both by the Easter Bunny — who turned out to be one of the people from the Comms department, Meghan Hays — and by his own wife, Jill, who was instructing him to “stay” after they were done reading and to “wave” from the balcony with the two Easter Bunnies. While they’re trying to wrangle him away from more gaffes, the effort to “handle” him makes him look even worse and then the handling gets reported instead. So I don’t think it helps him much.
But Joe Biden had another embarrassing moment during the reading to the little kids at the event. The deal seemed to be that Jill Biden was going to read the story to the kids but he was just going to sit there. But then Joe groused about not being allowed to read by the powers that be, “They’re not going to let me read,” he whined, like a five-year-old not getting the toy he wanted at the store. Then Jill relented and allowed him to read the first page, handing him the book, where he then talked about “reading it backward.” After reading the first page, he then turned it back over to her.
Who is this “they” that he keeps talking about, the “they” who seem to control the alleged leader of the free world? He’s controlled on a short lease when they don’t want him to even read a kid’s book for a couple of minutes. How bad is that — and how bad is his condition if they’re worried about even that?
The Bidens skipped one page — the one covering “red bird.”
But they didn’t miss the “black sheep.” “Black sheep black sheep,” Jill reads. “I see Jill looking at me,” Joe then said.
That’s funny, sad, and true all at the same time. That he even has to joke about her seeing him that way is sad and, sadly, she thinks she has to control him.
Then Jimmy Fallon came and joined them. He read from a children’s book that he wrote called “Nana.” But he didn’t take very long, either. So, collectively, they read for only about seven minutes. But then when Fallon and Jill Biden went to exit the stage, Joe didn’t immediately follow them and leave. Instead, he continued to babble. Except then someone cut or lowered his mic, so it was much harder to hear what he was saying, at about 11:57.
Jimmy Fallon laughs are whatever he says and the sign language interpreter can read his lips, so if you’re able to read that you might pick it up. The C-Span version has him thanking people at the end of this clip around 7:00, but it doesn’t sort out what the funny thing that Fallon laughed at was.
Then, I would note that the revelation as to who was in the Easter Bunny outfit perhaps explains a lot, because it’s the person that the NY Post’s Steve Nelson says gets a lot of the blame for trying to “handle” the access to Biden — Meghan Hays, the special assistant to Biden and director of message planning.
She didn’t do a great job with the messaging here.