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Politico 2/20/2023

West Wing Playbook

The power players, latest policy developments, and intriguing whispers percolating inside the West Wing.

Whose line is it anyway

By LAUREN EGAN and ELI STOKOLS

02/27/2023 06:27 PM EST

Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice.

Throughout his career, JOE BIDEN has been known as loquacious and gaffe prone. The man doesn’t stick to a script, which makes operating his teleprompter one of the trickier tasks in national politics.

Indeed, the president has a reputation in the event production business as one of the most difficult speakers to work with, according to six people with decades of experience in the industry who have run teleprompter for Biden and other well known public figures.

Biden has dealt with a stutter since childhood; it’s an issue he opened up about while on the trail in 2020. Some stutterers see his extemporaneous speaking style as an effort to manage or obscure his stuttering, to avoid certain words where he has “blocks.”

But Biden aides also acknowledge he loves to go on tangents, giving him a type of relatability that has served him well throughout his career — an average Joe persona telling hokey stories and offering up deeply personal vignettes.

For voters, those tangents are often great. For teleprompter operators, less so. One operator described working with Biden during the 2008 election cycle as “chaos,” because of his propensity to jump around from item to item, some of them not even in the script.

Another teleprompter operator, who has worked with dozens of political candidates, government officials and corporate executives over a 30-year career, called Biden “the hardest client I have ever had to prompt for.”

Invented in the late 1940s to help actors with their lines, the teleprompter quickly became a hit for any televised event requiring script reading. During the 1952 presidential campaign, both Democrats and Republicans used it at their nominating conventions. It’s been a mainstay in American politics ever since — allowing politicians to engage more with their audiences rather than looking down at a piece of paper.

The actual teleprompter operator never meets face-to-face with the speaker, instead relying on the script and the politician’s cadence to keep the words flowing. Still, it’s an intimate relationship. Operators learn the speaker’s style and quirks and anticipate how he or she might respond to different crowds and settings. The speakers, in return, are entirely reliant on the operator to keep up with them — no matter how out of order they get — to avoid awkward moments, blank stares, and revealing pauses while on live TV or appearing at a campaign event.

Politicians have earned their own reputations within the production business.

Former President GEORGE W. BUSH struggled to look natural and moved his eyes so much that it was obvious he was reading from a teleprompter (one teleprompter operator said they show new speakers videos of Bush as an example of what not to do). Former Secretary of State MIKE POMPEO is known to completely ignore the prepared script and do his own thing, much to his staff’s frustration. Former President DONALD TRUMP is a demanding client: he knows exactly what height he wants the teleprompter and has specific font size requests. The former president is also known to go on lengthy tangents wildly off script, leaving the operator wondering when he will drift back to the prepared text.

But Biden takes the cake.

“[Biden can be] the most stressful speaker,” said LAURI PLESCO, the owner of Peachtree Prompters in Georgia.

“He might go off topic and ad lib and then jump to something eight pages ahead. This is where an operator needs to search the script for the copy he jumped to. Then he might go back to something six pages prior,” she said. He is able to segue between places in the script and that is frightening for some teleprompter operators. If you remain calm and listen to where he is going in the speech, a very good teleprompter operator will be able to keep up with him. Plesco thought he could benefit from professional teleprompter training.

“I know from operating for him that there’s no practicing with the teleprompter before a live speech, so you must be prepared to keep up with him” she said. “For presenters, the teleprompter is a whole other animal than just speaking because you have to be aware of what’s on the script and discern what should be said or not said, depending on the operator’s formatting. At the same time you must also be in the moment and communicate with the audience while interpreting an inanimate object.”

Still, whatever anxiety Biden might cause, most teleprompter operators agreed that it was better to get a call from his team than Trump’s.

“Biden won’t break your equipment,” said the owner of a Florida-based production company, who also asked to speak on condition of anonymity to protect business relationships. They pointed to a 2016 campaign speech Trump gave in North Carolina when he, claiming that the teleprompter wasn’t working, knocked over one of the glass plates used to display the speech.

“That could put you back $8,000, easily,” the person said.

MESSAGE US — Are you A TELEPROMPTER OPERATOR WHO WASN’T STRESSED WHEN WORKING WITH BIDEN? We want to hear from you. And we’ll keep you anonymous! Email us at westwingtips@politico.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: LAUREN EGAN

Lauren Egan is a White House reporter and co-author of West Wing Playbook. She previously worked as a White House reporter at NBC News, where she also covered the war in Ukraine and the 2020 presidential campaign.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ELI STOKOLS

Eli Stokols is a White House correspondent and co-author of West Wing Playbook. He rejoined POLITICO in 2022 after nearly five years covering the White House for the Los Angeles Times. Prior to that, he covered the 2016 election at POLITICO.

A southern California native, Stokols began his journalism career in Louisiana and Colorado. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he pitched for the Cal baseball team (whenever they had a safe lead of five runs or more); and he holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.