Speak softly, carry a big stick: Republicans shout down whispering Joe’s rhetorical flourish

There comes a moment in the US President’s speeches and press conferences where he leans into the microphone, pauses for effect and delivers the next line in a ­theatrical whisper.

US President Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

There comes a moment in some of Joe Biden’s speeches and press conferences where he leans into the microphone, pauses for effect and delivers the next line in a ­theatrical whisper.

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, while discussing his infrastructure plans at a transport depot, the US President stooped to confide in a hushed, slightly menacing tone: “I think it’s time to give ordinary people a tax break.”

After a speech on his proposals in the East Room of the White House, he broke into a whisper several times while answering questions: “I got them $US1.9 trillion of relief so far,” he said in a husky hiss. “They’re going to be getting cheques in the mail that are consequential.”

On another occasion, leaning over his lectern, eyes bulging, he added in a whisper: “I wrote the bill on the environment. Why would I not be for it?”

Biden’s speaking style has been analysed extensively with reference to his residual stutter after a long battle to overcome the speech impediment, but his new mannerism has sent friends and foes alike into a frenzy. A video of his whispering moments tweeted by conservative website Townhall has been viewed 4.7 million times.

Arizona Republican congressman Andy Biggs tweeted: “Creepy Joe just took on a new meaning.”

Late-night talk show Stephen Colbert featured clips of Biden’s “new rhetorical flourish” before leaning into a microphone and whispering: “Mr President, Mr President. You know I’m a fan, but the way you lean forward and whisper. Guess what? It’s a little creepy. It’s a little creepy.”

Academics have put a positive spin on the affair. “It’s an intimate form of communication,” Vanessa Beasley, associate professor of communication studies at Vanderbilt University, said. “I think it’s a symbolic gesture to a kind of intimacy and familiarity.”

Robin Lakoff, professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, contrasted Biden’s approach with the more verbose and louder style of his predecessor Donald Trump. “One of the things that Trump never did was whisper,” she said.

Others are not convinced. ­Kayleigh McEnany, Trump’s former press secretary, said on her Fox News program Outnumbered: “Yikes! That’s President Biden using the tactic of whispering during his speeches and press conferences. The White House communications experts say it’s a way for him to connect with voters.

“For the AP to cite an expert saying this is an intimate form of communication – I think it’s a creepy one.”

Referring to a horror film, Emily Compagno, her fellow presenter, added: “On the whispering, you guys, I’m sorry but when someone whispers in that Candyman way, I do not feel connected. I feel frightened.”

The whisperings were fast ­becoming Biden’s own “tan suit controversy”, a summer fashion choice by former president Barack Obama in 2014 that provoked inordinate discussion and earned its own Wikipedia page.

In later years, “tan suit controversy” became Washington shorthand for a storm in a teacup signifying that the opposition had little to go on. A White House spokesman ­responded: “This performative criticism is just the latest acknowledgment by Republicans that he’s running the table on them while they’re grasping for a case to make.”

Yet the furore may have had an impact. Just as Obama’s tan suit was eventually consigned to the wardrobe, whispering did not feature in Biden’s most recent oration on voting rights in Philadelphia.

Yet the treatment of the speech, in which Biden attacked Republicans for passing state laws on voting he claimed were the biggest attack on democracy since the Civil War, pointed to the real problem he has perhaps been trying to address: being heard in the first place. The only two news networks to broadcast the speech live were CNN and MSNBC, meaning that many conservative-minded viewers never got to see it at all.

The Times