The president is scaring Democrats this Halloween

One of the lesser-known duties of reporters assigned to the White House beat is to spend one day per month in the presidential pool.

-  ANDREW FEINBERG

The pool is a rotating group of reporters who shadow the president whenever he makes a public appearance at the White House or in the Washington, DC area. When you’re up, you’re up – and you only get the details of which event you’ll be attending hours before it happens.

With the election just six days away, I was called up on Wednesday. And because pooling means a lot of time waiting around – for security checks, for the president and everyone else to ready themselves for a public appearance, and so on – I spent a good part of that day planning our election week strategy.

Since current president Joe Biden isn’t on the ballot this year, having ceded the Democratic ticket to vice-president Kamala Harris, he was able to spend his Wednesday with a particularly light schedule. In the morning, he welcomed Cypriot president Nikos Christodoulides to the Oval Office.

This gave me and my other colleagues who were pooling that day a chance to shout questions at Biden about an unfortunate remark he’d made the night before, when he appeared to refer to supporters of former president Donald Trump as “garbage.”