Ron Klain and the Never-Ending Crises
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This is a test. For the next 400 seconds, this newsletter will conduct a test of the Emergency Fake Ron Klain Email System. This is only a test — and a fake memo.
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TO: JRB
FROM: Ron Klain
DATE: 1/26/22
RE: What do you call a crisis that never ends?
**************************
Good morning.
We continue to keep your public schedule very light so you can hop on and off calls with world leaders and meet with your national security team throughout the day.
Obviously, we need the nation and the world to see you as a tough, resolute, strong wartime commander in chief until you successfully stare Putin down.
However, my plan to make sure we don’t have staff departures anytime soon is reaching a breaking point.
It has become difficult to convince folks they need to stay until we are out of the crisis period when the number of crises on our plate keeps growing, and there is no end in sight for any of them.
I know your patience for gallows humor has grown short, but, at a late night session, the senior staff decided to list just the biggest current crises we face: Russia, the pandemic, inflation, the supply chain, your legislative agenda, your poll numbers, the Office of the Veep.
If we stick to “no one leaves until we are past the crisis phase,” it looks like I will be chief of staff until January of 2025 – by which I mean, of course, January of 2029.
Not much has changed overnight on Ukraine.
Mitch McConnell made some publicly supportive comments about our posture Tuesday, and we are briefing the heck out of the Hill, but the Ted Cruzs and Tom Cottons of the world are poised to take after us if things go south.
As you will remember, President Macron is scheduled to talk to Putin on Friday. We continue to try to intervene in world energy markets to take pressure off of Europe, but the weak German link is there for everyone to see.
It seems crazy that we still don’t actually know how Germany will react to an effort to rally a unified response to an incursion, but we don’t.
We continue to downplay and deflect any questions about the domestic politics of all this but the queries keep coming.
The Washington Post piece I’m sure you have already seen frames it just the way it was discussed by the Gang of 500 on Sunday. (As I told you, I went to the brunch – EXTREMELY reluctantly – because I thought it was vital to your presidency that I pre-spin the Washington Post profile of me which comms said was about to be published. Mission accomplished, I would say; I am now convinced that the answer is more tweeting rather than less.)
Here’s how the Post story starts:
Democratic strategists increasingly worry that Biden faces no easy options to avert a seemingly imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine — and that no matter how he handles Russian President Vladimir Putin’s escalation, he could end up looking weak.
“There’s a lot to lose politically, but there’s not a lot to gain,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and strategist. “I think the administration is doing a great job with this, but the Russians are the ones who are going to decide in the end whether to invade or not. If they decide not to invade, there are not going to be ticker tape parades for Joe Biden across America, and if they do decide to invade, people are going to wonder if the administration handled it correctly.”
The AP has a similar take:
President Joe Biden’s effort to rally support, both at home and abroad, ahead of a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine is just the latest big test of his ability to bridge ideological gaps and balance competing interests to build effective coalitions….
“Starting with the messy end of the war in Afghanistan in the late summer, the upsurge in COVID cases into the fall, overlaid by economic concerns of inflation and labor shortages and his issues with his legislative agenda, Biden’s found himself with a weary American public who are seeing a number of unfulfilled promises,” said Christopher Borick, director of the Institute of Public Opinion at Muhlenberg College. “The situation in Ukraine presents another test of his competency.”
The senior staff agrees that fighting with (or “clearing the air with”) Peter Doocy doesn’t necessarily make you look strong – or competent.
We need a win of some type for all sorts of reasons. The SOTU is in about a month, and as the poet Bonnie Raitt suggested, we need to give them something to talk about – in the press, on the Hill, in the country.
At some point, if you don’t start doing a lot more domestic travel, the media might notice that our big-ticket turn-the-page item explaining how we were going to re-set the narrative isn’t happening.
JUST KIDDING!
The press has practically forgotten about that already.
But, seriously, we need to turn things around.
We are trying to kickstart BBB but the more leg affairs explores polcy options, cadence, and sequencing, the harder things look. Relations between Chuck and Nancy are not at an all-time high. And, remember, we told the media that you were going to be LESS involved in sausage making than before, so we are sort of left deferring to the capacity of the congressional wing of our party to get this done.
It is probably a good thing we are staying out of it because your poll numbers are still not great.
Every Democratic campaign strategist doing 2022 midterm stuff I talk to has the same one thing to tell me and the same one question.
What they all tell me: Your numbers in their private polling are worse than the public data.
What they ask me: How are we going to turn things around?
Redistricting, candidate recruitment, some messy Republican primaries, and Trump could hold our losses down, but today we would lose north of 30 House seats and control of the Senate.
The poll snapshot is not good.
Pew suggests your pandemic performance is being panned:
And we appear to have lost Phil Bump, who goes public with what Anzo has been warning us about – the loss of Democratic support:
In new polling from the Pew Research Center, President Biden’s approval rating is at a remarkably low 41 percent. That’s in part because independents view him fairly negatively, as they have for a while. But it’s also because Democrats don’t love him as much as they used to.
In Pew’s data, Biden has gone from 95 percent approval among Democrats last spring to 76 percent in January. Since September, the percentage of Democrats who say they strongly approve of the job he’s doing has fallen from 27 to 21 percent. That’s a problem in part because approval ratings are a continuum: Voters don’t go from strongly approve to strongly disapprove in one fell swoop. First they transition from strong to less-strong approval — as many Democrats have.
The pandemic is indeed a problem.
We remain one step forward, 4.5 steps back.
This Bloomberg story seemed good:
Packed bars in San Francisco. Popular hot yoga classes in Boston. Signs are mounting that many Americans in highly vaccinated places are grasping for a near-normal life, even as the most contagious COVID-19 surge yet passes over.
Ellen Murphy, a 73-year-old in New York’s Brooklyn Heights who scrupulously stayed home during previous surges, will fly to her niece’s Florida baby shower next month.
“Maybe this is some level of magical thinking, but I’ve done everything that I’ve been told to do,” she said. “I got my shots, I got my booster, I wear my mask, I don’t go into crowded places with people I don’t know. It’s kind of like, what else can I do?”
But of course all that out-and-about, happy-days-are-here-again activity is contributing to the spread and more deaths, as per the Wall Street Journal:
Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. have reached the highest level since early last year, eclipsing daily averages from the recent Delta-fueled surge, after the newer Omicron variant spread wildly through the country and caused record-shattering case counts.
The seven-day average for newly reported Covid-19 deaths reached 2,191 a day by Monday, up about 1,000 from daily death counts two months ago, before Omicron was first detected, data from Johns Hopkins University show. While emerging evidence shows Omicron is less likely to kill the people it infects, because the variant spreads with unmatched speed the avalanche of cases can overwhelm any mitigating factors, epidemiologists say.
We still think we can get the pandemic under control; inflation and the supply chain, however, are looking very tough.
As you know, the Fed is meeting today, and we have to hope that the markets like what they say.
Fingers crossed.
Here is my honest view of the problem.
Bill Galston has a well-intentioned column on how we really need to pay attention to inflation, which the polls suggest is indeed a big concern for voters.
Here’s the heart of his advice:
If I were president, I would be attacking it head-on, beginning with a major speech explaining what is happening and followed by regular public events highlighting efforts to attack various dimensions of the problem, from reducing the backlog at ports to recruiting and training truckers to making sure grocery shelves are stocked.
The good news: We are already doing exactly that.
The bad news: Your events are so low impact that no one is noticing.
Yes, this is a lot of crises to handle.
Despite my glittering resume, I know I need to work even harder to turn this around and set a good example.
So I am committed to upping my work hours from 20 hours a day, six days a week (with 18 hour days on Sundays) to 21 hours a day, seven days a week.
That should do it. Diet cola will keep me awake.
By the time you are done at the gym, we will have updates from Tony, Jake, and the Pentagon.
I will see you then.
Have a great workout.