The president is scaring Democrats this Halloween
The Independent|November 01, 2024
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 president is scaring Democrats this Halloween

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.”

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