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Now: On with the FAKE Ron Klain memo to the president.
****
TO: JRB
FROM: Ron Klain
DATE: July 22, 2022
RE: Time is short, and the road is long, in the blinking of an eye, that moment's gone
Thomas Hardy called it “hap,” and it can mean different things at different moments.
Your getting COVID can be a crisis, a nothing burger, or an opportunity.
In terms of leveraging the moment itself, one day in, that seems unlikely.
We need to be honest right now, sir: The media is shockingly but not surprisingly much more interested in Donald Trump than the fact that the oldest president in American history has somehow contracted a deadly disease that could kill you and make Kamala Harris president within the week.
Check out the Washington Post homepage:
All TRUMP!
Since Anita says it is imperative that we show the American people you are hard at work, we’ve put together a “schedule” of what you are doing today:
DAILY SCHEDULE FOR
FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2022In the morning, the President will receive the President’s Daily Brief virtually. This meeting will be closed press.
In the afternoon, the President will meet virtually with his economic team on the progress being made to lower gas prices for American families. This meeting will be closed press.
After, the President will meet virtually with his Senior Advisors to discuss the progress on Capitol Hill on his legislative priorities. This meeting will be closed press.
I know you typically work out in the gym as regularly as Secretary Clinton (secretly) consults with Doug Schoen, so these next few days will be tough for you.
But that also means you are going to have a lot of time on your hands, and I want you to use it to consider where your presidency stands now.
Since few people have the nerve to even try to tell you the truth, it’s time that I do: Your presidency is in extreme crisis politically and substantively.
Now is the moment to change course.
The public polling is not the only way to quantify what is happening, but it does tell a consistent (and consistently gruesome) story. Beneath the job disapproval and wrong track numbers, your standing with young people, independents, Hispanic voters, you name it – all just horrible.
Even Anzo – our own pollster! – is getting miserable data back – and releasing it publicly:
We can’t just keep pretending that one questionable crosstab in a poll means there isn’t a problem. Or laugh at Dr. Oz and Herschel Walker. Or cherry pick the public data that shows the Ds holding their own on the generic ballot.
And Steve’s “pals” and Mike’s barely-there grunty whispers are not going to do the trick either.
All our donors and even our most loyal allies on the Hill all think you have lost your way, with most attributing it to your having turned hard left as you reentered the swamp. They don’t think this ok.
Our cozy band of brothers is looking tight and insular and wrong.
Here’s an analysis I saw of your presidency yesterday:
Nineteen months into his first term as president, Joe Biden appears to be the lamest of lame ducks. The rapidity and completeness of his political collapse is unprecedented in my long life as an observer of such things, and possibly in our history. It’s as if the death scene that wrapped up an elaborate plot happened 15 minutes into the movie. What on earth can we expect for next two hours? Similarly, with Biden disappearing into a tar pit of irrelevance, the next two-plus years until the 2024 presidential election present an uncertain and inscrutable aspect.
The array of disasters accumulated by Biden in less than two years is impressive: defeat and humiliation in Afghanistan; the outbreak of war in Europe; spiking inflation and energy costs; a sputtering economy; a resurgent pandemic; supply chain disruptions of essential goods like baby formula. The response to each crisis has followed a recurring pattern. Ignorance and denial come first. A few comic pratfalls later, the rhetoric turns to panicked scapegoating. The essential duty of government, which is fixing the situation, gets skipped altogether.
Such impotence is, in large part, a function of the astounding levels of unreality and policy incoherence that afflict decision-making in the administration….
Biden has frightened away key elements of his winning coalition: Hispanics, suburbanites, independents, the young. The consequences will be felt in the midterm elections this November, which are expected to result in a slaughter of Democratic candidates. If the Republicans win majorities in Congress, as now seems likely, the president’s troubles will only multiply. The existential question for Democratic Party leaders is: What is to be done in 2024?..
No candidate has ever won national office by promising to disband the police or exorcise the Founding Fathers. The fixation with sexual fluidity repels socially conservative minorities. The demonization of American history shocks many immigrant groups.
Now, that was written by a right-leaning academic, but literally every word could have been uttered by Senator Coons or Jon Meacham, if they would say to you directly what they say to others.
When the First Lady threw out her prepared remarks on Nantucket last weekend and told donors that you “had so many hopes and plans for things he wanted to do, but every time you turned around, he had to address the problems of the moment,” I know she was reflecting the frustration you both feel, including about the media coverage.
We have to be honest, here, too. That isn’t going to get better on its own, either.
The press doesn’t like you; they think you are old, irrelevant, not very interesting, and on your last legs (at least politically). The people covering you – and us – it isn’t like Dan Balz and David Broder and you in 1996. There is no residual or reservoir of good feeling. Today’s reporters never had dinner with you at I Ricchi, they never met Beau, and they won’t shed a tear for you and the family if Hunter gets indicted – they will be excited about it.
And they aren’t looking to prop you up (except if it is essential to stopping the return of Donald Trump, but they no longer see you in that role, given all the polls saying no one wants you to run again).
The betting markets, which are often wrong but do reflect some slice of opinion, think you have only a 4 in 10 to be our nominee again. Given your illness, it wouldn’t be surprising if that number got even worse.
In the face of this, we need to begin thinking about restart strategies.
And I’m not talking about one-off messaging days, like you were supposed to have in Pennsylvania yesterday talking about crime, before we had to cancel.
The New York Post editorial board’s take on that event actually reflects how the Dominant Media would have covered what you said (and the negligible impact it would have had):
This is a White House staff going through the motions because 1) they know Democrats stand to get slammed on Election Day and want to look like they’re doing something about it, and 2) the president imagines he can have an impact by making personal appearances — even though he won his job by hiding in his basement through the 2020 campaign so the public couldn’t see how much he’d lost off his fastball.
As the Clinton and Obama folks knew when they fought back, these rebranding efforts to get to the center can’t be one-and-done. We need six-act dramas: “leak” it is coming; you do an announcement event in the Rose Garden; you travel to highlight the issue, featuring an American family; you do a major TV interview on the details of the proposal; we “leak” an update report to Robert Pear (or whoever the equivalent is now); we do another event claiming progress.
We can start to tee some of that up for the fall, but for now, here is a menu of other options we could pursue to try to change the narrative.
* You need to pull a Sister Souljah on Senator Warren on….something. Anything!
* When Secretary Yellen retires, let’s give Treasury to Ken Chenault.
* Bring Terry McAuliffe in as chief of staff – if you decide you need a new chief of staff.
* In the meantime, get “caught” visibly consulting with Rahm.
* Stop talking about abortion; shift instead to championing contraception and child care and let the Republicans look nuts.
* Form an economic advisory council of a cross section of “great Americans.”
* Have a visible confab with previous Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Defense of both parties on the national direction for the long term.
* Step above party to appeal to the broad American center.
We can begin to execute on this plan next week, assuming you recover quickly and get sprung from solitary in five days.
If you do take a turn for the worse, the speculation about The Veep is going to grow. While Mark Barabak wrote in the LA Times that she is the frontrunner to succeed you, we both know the score there.
I think about the guilt Steve Schmidt evinces for having almost put Sarah Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency. Well, look what we actually did.
Speaking of your heart, there is going to be increased speculation about the implications of your going off of your meds there while you are on Paxlovid, which the New York Post notes “elevates the risk of dangerous blood clots.”
This is why we need to hope we can get away with promising the media daily updates but not letting them talk directly to Dr. O’Connor. The devil will truly be in the details, including why he let you stop wearing masks in public (and at private meetings).
Nancy Gibbs, speaking for the Gang of 500, wrote in the Times, “If Mr. Biden develops serious and debilitating symptoms, the White House has a strong obligation to disclose it.”
If you end up getting rushed to Walter Reed, there will be no hiding from a deluge of questions.
In the meantime, all these fancy pants doctors, like Rahm’s brother, who think we should reimpose mandates, apparently don’t read the polls:
“I think this is a moment to reckon with high transmission and that we should aspire to a better normal than this,” said Julia Raifman, a public health professor at Boston University who has called for federal support for mask mandates, holding more gatherings outdoors, and other mitigations. “We’ve already lost more than 500,000 people to covid during this administration. … This is an opportunity to not minimize or exaggerate the president’s infection — and to acknowledge that it is a serious illness for people who are over 70.”
Obviously we are not going back to a world of restrictions, especially ones that would ruin America’s August vacations and the return to school in the fall.
Anything like that would just make your political standing even worse.
But I digress.
We need to move towards better, and now.
So please consider the list I laid out above.
There is one more thing we could try.
I know you and I have been united in believing that ruling out a 2024 run would render you a lame duck and destroy the last two years of your term.
I believe we need to think anew there.
You could announce as you come out of quarantine that you are not running again, to concentrate on bridging the current troubled world (and your troubled presidency) to a new and better place.
Maybe Vice President Harris could take the same pledge.
Dramatic moves, to be sure.
And/but a bow to reality, given the polling for both of you, which suggests you are de facto lame ducks as it is.
Think about all of this please and let’s video conference later about it.
I know you typically work out in the gym as regularly as Secretary Kerry bemoans what might have been, so these next few days will be tough for you.
I’m here for whatever you need.