Biden later called the Fox correspondent for a conversation to “clear the air,” as Doocy described it. As the target of the insult, Doocy said Biden succeeded in doing just that.

The air between the reporter and the president, of course, is not the most important air that needs clearing from Biden’s perspective. It is the gap between the grand hopes Democrats had for his presidency a year ago and the present reality of a stalled agenda, a divided party, a rancid political culture and the haunting sense that he may not be quite up the task of turning all this around in time for 2022 and 2024 elections.

As it happens, Biden’s lapse of presidential decorum hints at a path toward restoring presidential vitality.

The whole encounter — including Doocy’s genial refusal to get all huffy about Biden’s flash of huffiness — was in its own way quite winning. It was also a reminder of how many memorable Biden moments feature casual profanity or bursts of authentic emotion amid the pervasive phoniness of contemporary politics.

There was the famous time when he whispered to President Barack Obama at a White House podium that the passage of health care reform was “a big fucking deal.” Or when he told an Iowa voter who pressed him on his ethical and physical fitness for the presidency that, “You’re a damn liar, man,” before challenging him to a pushup contest. Perhaps Biden’s most memorable moment during the fall 2020 presidential debates was when he responded to former President Donald Trump’s incessant interruptions by rasping, “Will you shut up, man?”

These exchanges offer a small window into a potential remedy for a big problem. Biden has spent his adult life seeking, and finally holds, an office which by many conventional standards he is poorly equipped to hold. The modern presidency at its core is a communications platform. Key to its power, for better and for worse, is its ability to dominate public conversation. A noxious example is the all-consuming grip Trump held on public attention. A more ennobling example is what Franklin D. Roosevelt meant when he said, “The presidency is not merely an administrative office. … All our great presidents were leaders of thought at a time when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.”

So the fact that Biden lacks the expressive gifts of most predecessors is a serious liability.

He can’t use a grand setting to make a statement designed to echo across generations, as John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan did when challenging communism at the Berlin Wall. Do you recall Biden’s address a few months ago to the United Nations? No, you don’t, because it was a compound of gassy banalities, organized around a string of rhetorical questions that recalled a high school valedictorian’s speech.

Last week’s two-hour news conference arguably blunted concerns about whether he lacks the endurance and mental acuity to spar with reporters. But the fact that his team spent the next day cleaning up his surplus candor — when he warned Russia against a Ukraine invasion but said a minor incursion might not be such a big deal — showed the perils of this format.

At the other extreme, a fiery moral summons has its own risks for Biden, who is by temperament an accommodater. When he said Republican efforts to limit voting access amount to “Jim Crow in the 21st Century,” some moderates in his own party warned he might be taking the comparison too far. When he journeyed to Capitol Hill to make closed-door remarks to Democrats to back him on the sweeping Build Back Better spending measure he failed to switch votes and the measure stalled.

How can a president lead with a voice that often fails demonstrably to persuade?

Whether Peter Doocy is a jerk does not count as one of those great national questions FDR was talking about when he described the clarifying power of the presidency.

But the encounter does point the mind toward two avenues in which Biden can become an effective communicator.

The first lies in the very relatable nature of the whole episode. Doocy had asked him, “Do you think inflation is a political liability in the midterms?” Biden responded sarcastically, with the rhetorical equivalent of an eyeroll: “It’s a great asset — more inflation.”

There is no chance that a hyper-articulate politician such as Pete Buttigieg would have handled the question in the same way. Biden must recall that he did not win principally with the votes of people who are impressed by Rhodes Scholars (Buttigieg picked up his Oxford degree in 2007). Doocy said when Biden called him the president said, “It’s nothing personal, pal,” and that, “We were talking about just, kind of, moving forward.”

That thought actually does come close to one of FDR’s “certain ideas in the life of the nation that had to be clarified.” In a diverse and fractious society, people inevitably are going to get jostled in the crowd. Pluralism requires muttering a complaint or two, brushing it off, and boarding the train to work.

This highlights a second way Biden might more effectively use the amplifying power of his office. Much of the recent commentary about him points to the failure of Build Back Better, after months of lobbying, to suggest that he has been a programmatic failure.

But in sheer dollar amounts Biden has had programmatic success — trillions in public investment were passed in his first year through Covid relief and the bipartisan infrastructure package.

Biden’s one strength as a political communicator is one he shared with an early mentor, Hubert Humphrey. Far more than either Trump or Obama, he projects an understanding of the concrete human dimensions of political and policy matters — how everyday citizens are affected by what Washington does. The infrastructure bill in particular is replete with examples — concrete in the literal sense — that Biden can use to make a larger argument about the impact of his presidency and make his philosophical case about the merits of activist government. Here is a way a distressingly weak communicator could transform into a memorably strong one.

Which brings us back to Biden’s penchant for the occasional f-bomb or growling encounter. Let’s see if polls show that others enjoyed the Doocy exchange as much as I did. If so, perhaps it’s time for Biden to cancel the tired tradition of recognizing American heroes at the State of the Union in favor of a new approach: I’d like to recognize in the audience tonight Al Miller, an inventory manager from Zanesville, Ohio. He’s basically a decent guy, but when he’s blathering about politics even his friends think he’s full of shit. C’mon, give me a break, man, and put a sock in it.