Biden loses ground because he does not answer difficult questions (Opinion)

Biden: The first thing I did was go back to the Paris Agreement 0:33

Editor's Note:

Scott Jennings, a CNN contributor and Republican campaign advisor, was a special assistant to President George W. Bush and a campaign advisor to Senator Mitch McConnell.

He is a partner at RunSwitch Public Relations in Louisville, Kentucky.

Follow him on Twitter @ScottJenningsKY.

The opinions expressed in this comment are yours. 

(CNN) -

As I watched President Joe Biden's forum on CNN on Thursday night, I kept wondering: What's the point of this?

Who is the audience?

Biden is stuck right now with two political problems: trying to appease disparate factions in his party while trying to pass his agenda and his own flagging poll numbers.

It struck me as odd that he was negotiating his budget reconciliation package on live television.

Did you say anything about anything that would have convinced Senators Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema to change their mind and vote in favor of the bill?

I certainly haven't heard of it.

He put himself in the strange place of articulating the positions of people who oppose quite important parts of his plan.

If the point of this was to create such an overwhelming wave of support that senators from West Virginia and Arizona had to succumb to it, that did not happen.

Biden: We will train immigrants to be nurses 0:37

Chances are, his advisers thought this event would bolster his fading poll numbers.

They are simply brutal.

Overall approval of Biden's work, according to the CNN poll, is 50% disapproval versus 44% approval.

And within polls, he suffers major drops on a number of issues and personal characteristics, including whether people consider him honest, mentally sharp, and running a competent administration.

Did you solve any of those problems on Thursday night?

No. He rambled a lot.

He did that strange thing of leaning in and whispering a few times.

He circled and gave inefficient and long answers to most of the audience's questions (some of which were timely and deserved more direct answers).

It did show basic human compassion for the late Colin Powell, the former secretary of state who passed away this week, something Donald Trump was unable to muster earlier this week.

That moment was a bit of a reminder of how Biden won in the first place.

But did any onlookers - other than the most partisan of the Democrats - walk out of that city hall tonight thinking, "Man, this guy is on top of his game!"

• ANALYSIS |

  5 takeaways from the CNN forum with Joe Biden

Borrowing a phrase: "Come on, man!"

A couple of things I found interesting:

Biden's admission that he used bad judgment in stating that the Justice Department should go after people who reject congressional subpoenas in connection with the Jan.6 commission was ... something.

He clearly stated that he will not pick up the phone to call the Justice Department and tell them who to prosecute.

Of course, they don't need that.

You can say out loud what you want and the Department of Justice leadership will see it, even if Biden retracts afterward.

They know that Biden would like to see this group of people prosecuted.

Biden didn't need a phone call to publicize those views.

But Biden did something similar last month when he publicly stated that border patrol agents on horseback who were falsely accused by some Democrats of flogging Haitian migrants would "pay," even though they are federal employees under investigation and entitled to the due process that any federal employee would have when accused of official misconduct.

This shows that when the president says something out loud, it cannot be put back in the bottle.

Can those border agents now get fair treatment from their superiors?

Of course they cannot.

Biden once said that "a president's words matter," and he sure knows it well.

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