By Jim Geraghty
Tuesday, June 07, 2022
Dear White House staffers: It doesn’t do you, or your boss, any good to leak to the press how frustrated and beleaguered President Biden feels.
Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets. . . .“I’ve heard him say recently that he used to say about President Obama’s tenure that everything landed on his desk but locusts, and now he understands how that feels,” a White House official said.Amid a rolling series of calamities, Biden’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break. “Biden is frustrated. If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” said a person close to the president. . . .Biden is annoyed that he wasn’t alerted sooner about the baby formula shortage and that he got his first briefing in the past month, even though the crisis had long been in the making. (The White House didn’t specify when Biden got his first briefing on the formula shortage.)
President Joe Biden and his aides have grown increasingly frustrated by their inability to turn the tide against a cascade of challenges threatening to overwhelm the administration. . . .First aides need to quell the finger-pointing that’s been erupting internally and the increasing concern over staff shakeups, according to five White House officials and Democrats close to the administration not authorized to publicly discuss internal conversations. They also increasingly are trying to soothe the greatest source of West Wing frustration, coming from behind the Resolute Desk.The president has expressed exasperation that his poll numbers have sunk below those of Donald Trump, whom Biden routinely refers to in private as “the worst president” in history and an existential threat to the nation’s democracy. . . .Far more prone to salty language behind the scenes than popularly known, Biden also recently erupted over being kept out of the loop about the direness of the baby formula shortage that has gripped parts of the country, according to a White House staffer and a Democrat with knowledge of the conversation. He voiced his frustration in a series of phone calls to allies, his complaints triggered by heart-wrenching cable news coverage of young mothers crying in fear that they could not feed their children.
Joe Biden, you’re the president. You asked for this job. You campaigned for this job. You assured us, over and over again, that you had the right kind of experience and judgment to do this job. You are now in the job that you’ve been trying to get since 1987. Stop whining about how difficult the job is.
Mr. President, if you think you’re being undermined by your staff, then fire the current staffers and hire new ones. The headline of the Politico article is: “Biden wants to get out more, seething that his standing is now worse than Trump’s.” Just who is stopping you, Mr. President? If you want to travel out to the rest of the country more, then travel to the rest of the country more.
Who decided that Biden would go so many days with no public events?
Does this look like a president in full command? Did you feel reassured when the Easter Bunny nudged him away from reporters during the Easter Egg Roll?
Have you noticed that President Biden keeps telling reporters that he’s not supposed to answer their questions?
May 12, 2021: “You guys are bad. I’m not supposed to be answering all these questions. I’m supposed to leave, but I can’t resist your questions.”
August 29, 2021: “I’m not supposed to take any questions but go ahead.”
December 21, 2021: “I’m not supposed to be having this press conference right now.”
March 24, 2022: “I guess I’m not supposed to say where I’m going, am I?”
Just who is telling the president of the United States that he’s not supposed to be talking to reporters? Is he a small child who’s not supposed to talk to strangers? Why does he keep telling us that he’s being stage-managed and kept away from reporters?
When Biden keeps saying things like that, it’s no wonder that Elon Musk quipped, “It’s hard to tell what Biden’s doing, to be frank. The real president is whoever controls the teleprompter.”
Republicans say that Biden isn’t in charge of his own administration because Biden keeps saying that he isn’t in charge of his own administration!
Dan McLaughlin asks, fairly, when Biden will start firing people.
I will note that it is quite possible that Biden is indeed poorly served by his staff. A few episodes ago on The Editors, I laid out the near-inevitable gradual decline of White House staffs during presidencies. When a new president comes to town, everyone is eager to work in his administration or cabinet. People will walk away from lucrative and prestigious jobs for the opportunity to have a key role in a new presidency. At the beginning of his first term, the president’s political capital and influence with Congress is at its highest, the air is full of optimism and energy, and he has his pick of the very best talent in the country. The president’s first staff and cabinet are his “A Team.”
But working in the White House or in a top-level cabinet position means long hours and a relentless pace, with a lot to do against the ticking clock of the midterm elections. About two years later, the president has usually done a ton of work and had a rough midterm. The “A Team” gets burned out and is ready to move on to more lucrative private-sector roles. The “B Team” — the deputies and assistants and people who came in second during the interviews before the inauguration — usually step in sometime around the second or third year.
If a president is lucky enough to win a second term, well, then the “B team” is ready to depart to corporate consulting, lobbying, academia, writing their memoirs, and stepping into their media gigs. At the start of the second term, the “C Team” takes over. These folks usually aren’t the best, but they’re loyal, and they’ve kept their noses to the grindstone for four years. They’ve earned their promotions, even if they might be in a little over their heads.
And after the second midterm — which usually goes badly as well — well, by then, the “C Team” is ready to move on and the party’s top rising talent is really focused on who’s going to be the next nominee for president. So, by year seven of a two-term presidency, the increasingly exhausted president is left with the metaphorical dregs of whoever’s still around and willing to do the job — the “D Team.” Hey, somebody’s got to keep the executive branch working during the lame-duck years. A White House is much less likely to recruit top-tier figures from Capitol Hill, the corporate world, academia, or other fields at this point in an administration’s life cycle. They’re asking these potential recruits to walk away from good jobs to spend two years in an administration that gets less attention and coverage than the Iowa caucuses or Super Tuesday.
In 2015, Ron Klain was coordinating Barack Obama’s response to Ebola. Jen Psaki was moving from State Department spokeswoman to Obama’s communications director. Steve Ricchetti was Vice President Biden’s third chief of staff, and Kate Bedingfield was Biden’s communications director. Current White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was deputy campaign manager for Martin O’Malley’s presidential campaign.
The problem is that a lot of Joe Biden’s “A Team” was Barack Obama’s “E Team.”
There are exceptions; agree with Treasury secretary Janet Yellen or not, she’s no lightweight. But there are some curious reports that, when it’s counted the most, Biden hasn’t heeded Yellen’s advice:
Janet Yellen, worried by the specter of inflation, initially urged Biden administration officials to scale back the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan by a third, according to an advance copy of a biography on the Treasury secretary.“Privately, Yellen agreed with Summers that too much government money was flowing into the economy too quickly,” writes Owen Ullmann, the book’s author and a veteran Washington journalist, referring to former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who severely criticized the size of the aid plan. The book is due out on Sept. 27.A Treasury spokesperson disputed the claims.“The Secretary did not urge a smaller package and, as she has said, believes that without the American Rescue Plan, millions of people would have been economically scarred, and the country’s historically fast recovery would have been far slower,” Treasury spokesperson Lily Adams said in response to the book’s claims.
Maybe the anecdote isn’t accurate or is exaggerated, but it would be odd for Yellen’s biographer to make it up out of whole cloth. And back in May, Politico noticed that Yellen had turned into a rather quiet voice in an administration facing big economic problems. In fact, she often seemed ignored, overruled, and snubbed:
She has surprised supporters by wielding less influence in the West Wing than her recent predecessors did in the job, which is often considered an administration’s chief economic policymaking post, say people familiar with the matter. . . .She was rebuffed in her objection to Biden’s choice of a progressive law professor to be the top banking regulator within her own department. The White House failed to consult Treasury on remarks Biden was preparing to give on the debt limit and tasked another Cabinet official with reaching out to CEOs. And when Democrats were deliberating over how to finance the president’s signature Build Back Better proposal, White House officials led the discussions with Congress, not Yellen or another senior Treasury official.
In that context, the notion of Biden ignoring Yellen’s warnings about the size of the Covid-relief package and inflation . . . feels awfully plausible.
If Yellen gave Biden good advice and he didn’t heed it, then her staff’s current denials represent her being a good soldier and taking the fall by denying she gave the advice. A cabinet member’s job is to make the boss look good.
But maybe no one can make Biden look good these days.
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