At this rate, every American will soon have a podcast. Two weeks ago, struggling to break through the noise of the coronavirus crisis, Joe Biden, like so many before him, plugged an SM57 microphone into a laptop and hit Record.

Here’s the Deal is less a podcast than the audio equivalent of a hostage holding up a newspaper with the day’s date. It is, as Will Leitch wrote for New York, “a weekly proof-of-life reminder for Biden. He’s still here, promise!” The first two episodes, featuring longtime Biden adviser Ron Klain and Michigan Governor (and potential vice presidential nominee) Gretchen Whitmer, barely stretch beyond 20 minutes each but feel at least 15 minutes longer than they should be.



Biden’s campaign clearly hoped that Here’s the Deal would be a twenty-first-century fireside chat, fostering the kind of intimate connection with voters that the now-presumptive Democratic nominee, for all his avuncular attributes, has struggled to generate during the 2020 campaign. The qualities that made him charming as a vice president—a mouth that moves faster than his mind, an overreliance on outdated euphemisms (“malarkey,” etc.)—now just make him seem old and out of touch. The problems with his podcast mirror the problems of his campaign.



Here’s the Deal is supposed to underscore Biden’s core message: that he represents a return to normalcy and competence after four years in a political nightmare. With Klain, who led the Obama administration’s Ebola response, we get a bite-size look at how a hypothetical Biden administration would be managing the pandemic. With Whitmer, a moderate governing a state with a Republican legislature, we get three cheers for bipartisanship.



The message doesn’t quite come across, partly because Biden is a clumsy podcast host. Despite being a major feature of his coronavirus-hobbled campaign, Here’s the Deal sounds cheap and thrown together. Biden’s odd speech patterns are sometimes heavily edited, giving them a chopped feel, like a grandpa appearing in a Tik Tok video. At other times, Biden speaks in paragraphs that are the verbal equivalent of someone falling down a rocky hill.

