Hello again, readers. It’s good to be back with you after a restful and refreshing break changing a few thousand diapers and pushing a stroller while daydreaming of an uninterrupted night’s sleep. If you see a sudden uptick in pro-natalist DC Diaries arguing for taxpayer-funded financial support for young families, you know why.
Inside a White House that still doesn’t get it
Washingtonians feeling a little sluggish as they head back to work after Memorial Day Weekend at least have an unusually detailed, gossip-laden look inside the floundering Biden White House to distract them from the long to-do lists waiting at their desks.
A piece by NBC’s White House team paints a picture of a president frustrated with his poll numbers and the direction of his presidency, exasperated by his aides and mulling a West Wing shake up. Biden, we are told, wants “a more compelling messaging and sharper strategy.” Hardly a surprise, given dire approval ratings and the rolling crises from which his administration have struggled to escape.
Among the president’s more concrete complaints, one stands out. The president is annoyed by his staff’s tendency to “clarify” some of Biden’s more off-the-cuff remarks. As Carol Lee, Peter Nicholas, Kristen Welker and Courtney Kube explain, Biden has thinks that the so-called clean-up campaign “undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.” They report that the issue “came to a head” after Biden’s ad-libbed that Putin “cannot remain power” when “Biden was furious that his remarks were being seen as unreliable, arguing that he speaks genuinely and reminding his staff that he’s the one who is president.”
That these details have surfaced from a usually leak-proof White House indicates a darkening mood in the administration. But Biden’s complaints, as well as the tenor of the whole piece, point to some of the ways in which he and his team still don’t appear to get it.
Self-exculpatory claims of bad luck are everywhere. “Amid a rolling series of calamities, Biden’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break,” the article claims. One person close to the president tells the authors that “Biden is frustrated. If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” Biden appears first and foremost frustrated not by the state of the country but not getting the credit he deserves. To which the obvious response is: credit for what?
The people running the country show very little awareness of discontent, hardship or frustration out there among Americans. Rather, their main gripe is how unfairly they are being treated. The Biden on display is narrow-minded and more interested in petty politics than the big picture, whingeing about how few Democrats are willing to defend him on television (a very Trumpy complaint that suggests a very Trumpy use of presidential downtime).
The lack of self-awareness extends to the frustrations over his staff’s clean-up campaigns. The president seems to think the main problem is one of perception: statements create the sense he isn’t in control, he claims, and play into the hands of his political foes. Isn’t the bigger problem that his comments need to be corrected and clarified in the first place? And might “Republican claims” that the president is not trusted even by his closest staffers have so much purchase because they happen to be true?
At root, the president’s problem is one of misdiagnosis: his is not a communications issue but something far deeper. He simply isn’t delivering. He isn’t getting credit for his economic track record, for instance, because it isn’t a very impressive economic track record. Until Biden realizes that he needs to rethink more than just how effectively his staffers are getting the message out, his political fortunes are unlikely to change.
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The Harvard connection
Was an Anthony Fauci-endorsed donation to Harvard University part of the suppression of the lab-leak hypothesis? That is the question at the heart of an investigation by Ashley Rindsberg for The Spectator. In our June issue, Ashley dives into the murky connections between one of America’s top colleges and the Chinese Communist Party. The result is a must-read. He explores whether those connections might help explain a sudden turnaround in the American scientific establishment’s view of the possibility that a lab leak in Wuhan was the cause of the pandemic. At the center of his investigation are a crucial few days at the start of the pandemic and a series of eyebrow-raising emails between Harvard officials, executives at the troubled Chinese property firm Evergrande and Anthony Fauci. Read the full story here.
Lunch with the boss
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are having lunch together today. On the campaign trail Biden promised his prospective Veep a weekly lunchtime pow-wow. Today’s meal will be… their third weekly lunch this year.
What you should be reading today
Peter Van Buren: The case for a federal red flag law
Jesse Singal: Who needs therapy?
Tony Woodlief: An un-American accusation
Nahal Toosi , Politico: The CIA’s Putinologist
Josh Rogin, Washington Post: How the UN became a tool of China’s genocide denial propaganda
Nicholas Fandos, New York Times: Maloney vs. Nadler? New York must pick a side (East or West)
Poll watch
President Biden job approval
Approve: 40.4 percent
Disapprove: 54.8 percent
Net approval: -14.4 (RCP Average)
Gallup Economic Confidence Index
March: -39
April: -39
May: -45
