Jen Psaki Blows Off Podcaster Insisting ‘Listening To Biden Became Actively Painful’

Former White House Press Secretary and current host of MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki Jen Psaki studiously ignored Bulwark publisher and Never-Trump podcaster Sarah Longwell as she denigrated former President Joe Biden as “actively painful” to listen to.

On this week’s edition of The Bulwark‘s The Focus Group Podcast with Sarah Longwell, Psaki and Longwell spent about an hour-and-a-half trying to diagnose what went wrong for Democrats in, and in particular if the “Liz Cheney Effect” played a big role.

But Longewll also took a few shots at Biden, whom Psaki served over the course of decades as a campaign and White House official.

In one exchange, Longwell roasted Biden by saying voters were asking “Is he alive?”, which Psaki diplomatically sidestepped as a generic concern about Biden’s age:

SARAH LONGWELL: This is also my fault. We haven’t gotten to groups yet because I do, but I also, I want to say, I want to ask one other thing, just because you were kind of around this stuff.

I believe that talking about democracy generally was a mistake and that Biden giving that Biden, people heard from Biden on almost nothing. And then when they did hear from him, it was like this lofty thing about democracy.

But here was my bigger beef that I don’t hear discussed that often, which is that the Democrats talked a lot about saving democracy. but did not do the things that would actually save democracy.

JEN PSAKI: Like what?

SARAH LONGWELL: Like they didn’t, well, like Joe Biden not running again for one.

JEN PSAKI: Well– Okay.

SARAH LONGWELL: Okay, but see, this is, but I’m sorry, this is where the fight kind of gets real, is I bristle at the notion that somehow Liz Cheney is like somehow that, gets to be the scapegoat, not that you’re scapegoating her.

But like she is people’s avatar for why Democrats didn’t win as opposed to. the insane notion that this guy should run for a second term when voters were like, “Is he alive? Is he,” I mean, you can hear in these, in these focus groups people say he’s sick all the time. They think he was sick.

JEN PSAKI: Which was, this won’t surprise you that his age was the biggest issue in any of the weekly polling data that we got at the White House.

Psaki blew off another comment from Longwell about the president, this time that he was “painful” to listen to:

JEN PSAKI: You know, Joe Biden, look, there are issues with disinformation. There are issues with media coverage, frankly. I mean, Joe Biden did probably hundreds of events on the economy, which weren’t covered. Right?

Should you do different events? Yes, that’s on them. You got to be modernizing, but also this fight and battle over democracy that like loop in Trump and January 6th was edgier for people to cover. Right?

So it’s like. It’s hard to gauge, right? I’m not saying the communication strategy was perfect. I just think that’s also a factor.

SARAH LONGWELL: Maybe they didn’t want to cover it in part because listening to Joe Biden became actively painful.

JEN PSAKI: Well, but he’s still, he was still the president, right? Yeah, like, you know, you can debate all the media things.

Okay, we’re gonna get to focus group. Okay. But the other thing I would say, a Joe Biden of 25 years ago, or 20 years ago. And the way he talks about economic issues and working people was probably more in line.

Watch above via The Bulwark‘s The Focus Group Podcast with Sarah Longwell.