Biden and his inner circle receive weekly testimonials on the coverage of his speeches in local newspapers, how long and why he was covered by cable, as well as videos that employees post on Twitter and other social media interactions. These reports garner internal insights from sociologists, which say Biden does not break into traditional news outlets and that the people involved are mostly voters who have already made up their minds.
But beneath this struggle for breakthrough lies a deeper dysfunction, calcified among assistants who have largely begun to work together only through Zoom screens and are still struggling to get into rhythm. It is still difficult for them to understand how much their political situation has changed in the last year, and there is a division between most White House officials and the inner circle who have been around Biden longer than most other staff. In an email to CNN, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said: “This is not the dynamics in the White House.”
At the center is a president who is still trying to calibrate for the office. The country is torn apart, pandemic infections keep coming, inflation keeps rising, a new crisis on top of the new crisis is coming every day and Biden can’t see a way to deal with it, while being freer, happier, more – Cute and loving Onion – An inspiring parody, a flying pilot, a vanilla chip licking cones – an image that was at the root of the reason he was chosen in the first place.
“He has to talk about very serious things,” said one White House official, “and you can’t do that by taking ice cream.”
Assistants regularly talk about how little traction they get from Biden’s one-off appearances or events and then – whether it’s inflation, shortages of milk or mass shootings or other crises landing on Biden’s desk – he often looks like he’s in reactive squatting on the issues that matter most to voters, rather than setting the agenda. Sometimes the cut-outs of these speeches that the White House broadcasts on social media generate a lot of traffic, but at least as often as moments from the president who seems to be caught unprepared, they go viral on their own.
Aides and allies worry that the West Wing is making the same mistakes as it advertises the White House’s big turn to inflation – which they know is a key issue for interim mandates – using all the methods Biden and his top advisers continue to return to. : Option of the Wall Street Journal, main photo-optical meeting in the Oval Office with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Minister of Finance, sending cabinet secretaries for short television interviews.
Biden’s speech Thursday night calling for real action on the new gun control laws was a departure from many of his recent appearances, complemented by a carefully arranged scene of mournful glass candles lining his path to the East Room.
But even with his intense remarks and repeated return to the word “Enough” and the presentation of an ambitious agenda that has little chance in Congress, despite widespread support among many Americans outside Washington, he is more responsive to the way the conversation took place. . already formed without him. And then, less than an hour after he finished issuing his call to action, Biden left for an early weekend at his house on the beach in Delaware, without a very public schedule for days.
The president is a 79-year-old man who still thinks in terms of the front pages of newspapers and television programs in prime time, surrounded by not-so-senior aides in senior positions on the same media diet since the late 1990s. Lifelong habits do not tend to fade when people reach their desks in the West Wing.
“These figures, which are presented by the ‘soft media’,” a senior adviser to other employees said recently, using a term designed to dismiss all platforms that are not older than Biden’s grandchildren, “don’t feel so real”
It’s not just the kind of news Biden consumes, according to CNN’s talks with 14 White House staffers and other Democrats in close contact with the White House. After 50 years of looking up to the Oval Office, television speeches and front-page stories are the way he thinks of a president who makes news, still seeing the presidency as something like Roosevelt’s ideal, where he can tell what’s going on. an audience gathered around to hear from the Commander-in-Chief, whose schedule is constantly being cleared to write, edit and review each set of notes.
“The speech is presidential, the remarks are presidential. His opinion is that if he can just explain to people what is happening and why, people will understand, “said a man familiar with Biden’s thinking.
Pointing finger at the White House
Biden aides cite a number of other factors – a political press still linked to Trump-style melodrama, a Ukraine-dominated news environment and a pandemic, a secret service buffer that limits what Biden can do, continuing unrest, that I will catch Covid -19 and probably really get sick.
It’s between pointing fingers at each other whose fault it is. They have the same internal encounters over and over again, insisting that they need to change their whole approach to the way they use Biden – and then watch each time nothing changes.
Older aides reject younger aides as being too obsessed with tweeting, thinking they say they lost the 2020 election to everyone else. Younger assistants are giving up – what’s the point of developing innovative ideas, they wonder if ideas are constantly coming down and assistants are being looked down on for offering them?
Asked about the president’s older media habits, Bates noted the weekly time on the president’s digital content schedule and the more than 70 employees who help create and manage his various accounts, as well as two interviews. in the last few months with creators working only online.
“The president has a well-rounded strategy that combines an unprecedented investment in digital engagement, speeches that provide many of his strengths, and interactions between people that demonstrate important qualities such as his empathy,” Bates said.
Biden traveled more around the country in May than in any month of his presidency. But almost every stop was the same routine, one-off events with several sad condolences, trips to Uwalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, they added.
Nothing happened that was not according to the script. Nothing that is not completely planned.
When they are announced, the assistants will be comforted by the direction of the local news, although the events are not registered outside of any media market. When they are honest, they admit that they have been slow to realize this. It seems that individual events on any topic never have much of an impact.
Speeches that broke out – such as the president’s mournful statement while the bodies were still identified in Uwalde – are rarely due to the words themselves or the broadcast.
This is because Biden himself shines, as when he, a father who has buried two of his own children, speaks of parents in Texas whose parts of their souls have been torn off, or when he visits for condolences a few days later, when he put his hand on a large photo of each student killed.
Assistants are still figuring out the best way to represent the president
Beyond these comforting moments, Biden and his aides know they don’t do much to make him empathetic.
He will talk about how he feels about his families’ struggles for inflation and gas prices. He will talk about how he knows about the difficulties of the pandemic and the shortage of formula. And then the assistants will tell how he talked about it.
They will tell themselves that there is not enough time in their schedule. Then they will say, in fact, no, he does the events that should resonate, just no one gives him credit.
They will note that the structure of White House staff – to the physical arrangement of offices so that press officers are gathered in the only accessible part of the West Wing – is about interacting with traditional media, even when viewers and readers dwindle.
They will say that he answers reporters’ questions whenever they ask him, while rejecting requests for interviews to avoid hours of preparation and possible cleaning. They will admit that Biden himself feels excluded enough to have quietly had half a dozen sessions with favorite writers since the fall, having lunch last month with Tom Friedman of the New York Times, in which the columnist shared his own impressions of Biden’s unregistered thoughts. with tuna sandwich, fruit bowl and milkshake approved for publication.
In a January note, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klein proposed a compromise plan that required Biden to build a town hall each month to capture at least some unrecorded moments and media coverage. This was absorbed in the trap of accusation and dysfunction like many others: some aides embraced the idea of shaking things up a bit, some mocked that it was an outdated idea, some complained that the logistics of doing so would be impossible and time consuming.
In the end, no town hall was planned. A White House aide said Wednesday that more mayoralties are now expected in the near future.
Conducting the presidency “from the Jeopardy set”
The most effective way Biden’s staff has found to convince people that the president is not a caricature of the fraudulent right-wing media is when people see him in action, they will say in meetings, emails and notes. And the best way to convince voters that he is taking action on a list of complaints that has been going on for almost a week is to show him that he is actually doing things.
These little moments, which have always been his magic, the virtuosity of retail politics to discover humanity in almost everyone he talks to and have them …
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