Reporter Asks Is Biden Living Up to ‘A President’s Words Matter’ Mantra With His Bombshell Putin Remark?
NBC News White House correspondent Mike Memoli asked White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield if President Joe Biden’s remarks about Vladimir Putin “live up to” the coda that “a president’s words matter.”
On Monday, President Biden addressed, at length, the brouhaha surrounding the bombshell closing line to his speech in Poland, nine words about Vladimir Putin that instantly made news: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
At a White House press briefing Tuesday, Mr. Memoli had a few more questions about it, including whether the president lived up to his own oft-invoked standard, and whether he “regrets” the line. Bedingfield doubled down on Biden’s doubling down, telling Memoli that President Biden “absolutely does not regret” the remark:
MR. MEMOLI: And, Kate, on the subject of the President’s remarks in Poland about President Putin: Obviously, yesterday, he tried to suggest that there was a distinction between his personal views of what he thought was a moral outrage versus an official policy position on the part of the United States.
But you know full well something that candidate Joe Biden said virtually every day on the campaign trail, which is that the words of a president matter; that they can, as he often put it, lead a country into war.
Is he not living up to the standard that he set himself during the campaign?
MS. BEDINGFIELD: Absolutely not. I think the words of the President here were incredibly powerful. He spoke personally about the moral outrage that he felt, which is shared by people all across the world. It does not mean he’s articulating a change in policy. It does not mean he’s laying out a change in U.S. policy.
He met with refugees — as, again, many of you were on that trip and saw — and saw firsthand some of the pain that Vladimir Putin has inflicted on people who are fleeing their homes and who are seeing their country war-torn.
So this was an incredibly personal, powerful statement of moral outrage; it was not an articulation of a new U.S. policy.
And I think both of those things can be and are true.
MR. MEMOLI: And you’ve spent some time with the President — last question, Kate — is he frustrated or does he regret that those words at the very end of the speech overshadowed a larger message, which obviously he put a lot of thought into in the days leading —
MS. BEDINGFIELD: Absolutely not. He spoke from the heart. He, as he always does — as you know very well from having covered him for a long time, as many of you do, and as the American people know — he speaks from the heart. He says what he feels. And, no, he absolutely does not regret that in any way.
Watch above via The White House and Fox News.
