WASHINGTON — Reports of Joe Biden’s disappearing act have been greatly exaggerated.

The lame-duck president has been globe-trotting, ceasefire-brokering, air strike-ordering, legacy-selling and holiday season-celebrating. And yet polls show the person once known by his man-of-the-people alias “Scranton Joe” remains unable to connect with voters — right until the very end of his presidency.

Why? His chief economic adviser this week offered a telling explanation.

To be fair, Biden has yet to hold a postelection news conference like more recent predecessors. He’s been taking questions from the daily press pool less often. In the past month, he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit a South American rainforest and spoke of African slavery as “our nation’s original sin” during a visit to Angola. But he barely interacted with journalists traveling on Air Force One on both lengthy foreign trips.

His media avoidance, overseas travel and relative silence since announcing a controversial pardon of his son Hunter have created a sense among some in official Washington that the 46th president has retreated from public view.

Perhaps they are not looking, or listening, hard enough. Or perhaps they can neither see nor hear Biden because of the noise surrounding President-elect Donald Trump’s daily deluge of nominations and appointments, his bombastic statements and posting of AI images, such as one furthering his talk of Canada becoming America’s 51st state.

Biden has already delivered public remarks four times since Sunday. On that day alone, he spoke publicly about the ouster of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, announcing “airstrikes within Syria targeting [Islamic State group] camps and ISIS operatives.” That night, he celebrated the arts at Washington’s Kennedy Center. After addressing a White House-arranged conference on women’s health research on Wednesday, he is scheduled to take part in a virtual meeting of G7 leaders on Friday.

But the reports of a vanishing president appear to mostly reflect the same inability of Biden and his White House team to connect with voters that helped keep his approval ratings low and that played a major role in leading powerful Democrats to push him to end his reelection bid in mid-July.

Tuesday alone offered a prime example.

Biden took a four-minute motorcade ride to the left-leaning Brookings Institution think tank, where he delivered what aides billed as a “major address” about his “economic playbook.” The speech quickly became a plea for Trump, once back in office, to consider running some of Team Biden’s plays: to blend his “America first” mercantile approach with Bidenomics, which the sitting president on Tuesday again described as managing the economy “from the bottom up and the middle out.”

The president began the legacy-minded address contending that he believes Trump would take office with a “fairly strong economy, at least at the moment.” The latter part was foreshadowing. He later warned that the president-elect’s version of “trickle-down economics” would be a “major mistake” that would tank the economy and produce “massive deficits” while also delivering substantial cuts to federal programs on which millions of Americans rely.

After speaking conversationally for much of the speech, Biden raised his voice toward the end, asking, “If we don’t lead the world, who will?” He then made a plea to his successor: “I pray to God the president-elect throws away Project 2025. I think it would be an economic disaster.”

Inflation was the economic disaster that helped end Biden’s reelection bid and sink Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. He mentioned a declining inflation rate more than 15 times during his Brookings address and hailed the price of gasoline per gallon dropping back to “3 bucks” while noting that “wages have increased, but still too many working- and middle-class families struggle with high prices for housing and groceries and the daily needs of life.”

As a 2024 candidate, Biden often cited some of the world’s prominent economists’ assessments of a strong American economy — even as polls showed that the perception among most Americans was the opposite. “Now, inflation’s coming down faster than almost anywhere in the world [among] advanced economies,” he said Tuesday.

“I’ve known every major world leader for, I’ve long been around 500 years. I know these guys, and I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t change their economy for ours,” Biden said. “Can you think of one, any major nation, that says … ‘I don’t want to trade. I’ll keep mine.’”

Paying a price

Later Tuesday afternoon, chief White House economic adviser Jared Bernstein fielded this question during a press briefing: “What would you say is the reason that there wasn’t enough of an improvement in people’s economic outlook by Election Day?”

After a long pause, Bernstein looked down at the blue lectern and slightly grimaced before answering in a rare moment of self-awareness from the Biden-Harris camp: They focused too much on the rate of inflation as a focal point of their messaging on the campaign trail.

“By the time the election came along, inflation was back down within a distance of 2 percent. … So the fact that people could still remember what things used to cost, that was a force that really whacked incumbents in every election, I think, virtually every election we’ve seen across the globe,” he said. “So that was a very powerful force.”

He also suggested the Biden and Harris teams were guilty of focusing too much on economic theory.

“Economics doesn’t think that much about the price level. It thinks a lot about inflation,” Bernstein said. “And not at all a critique of the mandate of the Fed. That’s the congressional mandate and the one they follow, but it’s full employment and stable inflation.”

As Democrats talked price-ignoring economic theory, Trump was dropping bold promises in simple-to-understand, one-line slogans. It all helped create a perception among many voters that Democrats had become the party of Washington elites.

And while his party struggles with how to reconnect with voters, Biden appeared Tuesday to be selling his economic record and policies mostly to the same D.C. set again.

“I’ve taken much too much of your time, and I apologize,” the five-decade Washington veteran said. “But you’re among the most informed people in Washington.”

The supportive crowd responded with a standing ovation for the soon-to-be-former president.

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