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(As I wrote in Thursday’s edition, “Oh, and I’m not really in Japan!,” which you skimmers missed, apparently. Again, I’m not really in Japan.)
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On first glance, news stories about tiffs among the White House staff and about media coverage are inside baseball yarns that don’t feed a single hungry child or help our American communities thrive.
However, this CNN.com story about the struggles of the current administration is, I contend, the single most important piece of journalism to date explaining the state (and future prospects) of the Biden administration.
Today’s Wide World of News will be relatively brief, because this CNN.com story is pretty long – and you need to spend time reading the whole thing.
The headline: “Beneath Biden's struggle to break through is a deeper dysfunction among White House aides.”
It is chock-a-block full of accurate, vivid reporting, spot-on analysis, and historical explanation of the non-magical 8 ball behind which Team Biden-Harris-Klain-Donilon finds itself.
Here’s a bit:
The President is a 79-year-old man who still thinks in terms of newspaper front pages and primetime TV programs, surrounded by not-quite-as-senior aides in senior positions with the same late 1990s media diet. Lifelong habits don't tend to fade when people get to their desks in the West Wing….
Biden aides cite a range of other factors -- a political press corps still hooked on Trump-style melodrama, a news environment dominated by Ukraine and pandemic, a Secret Service buffer that limits what Biden can do, lingering anxiety that he'll catch Covid-19 and possibly become really sick.
That's in between pointing fingers at each other for whose fault it is. They have the same internal meetings over and over, insisting that they need to change up their whole approach to how they're using Biden -- and then each time watch as nothing changes.
Older aides dismiss the younger aides as being too caught up in the tweet-by-tweet thinking they say lost the 2020 election for everyone else. Younger aides give up -- what's the point of working up innovative ideas, they ask themselves, if the ideas constantly get knocked down and the aides get looked down on for suggesting them?..
Aides regularly talk about how little traction they're getting from one-off Biden appearances or events and then -- whether on inflation, the baby formula shortage or mass shootings or the other crises landing on Biden's desk -- he's often left looking like he's in a reactive crouch on the issues that matter most to voters rather than setting the agenda…
Sometimes clipped moments from those speeches that the White House puts out on social media generate huge traffic but, at least as often, moments from the President appearing to be caught off-guard go viral on their own.
Again, read the whole thing.
The White House is already (sort of) denying the piece is accurate, but every word of it is correct – and the solutions to what ails this presidency are neither clear nor easy to execute.
If you can’t win by letting Biden by Biden and you can’t change Biden, where’s the exit?
And while Anita Dunn is very talented, she is not a magician.
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Amazing Celtics comeback in Game 1 of the NBA Finals, giving me a leg up on my bet with Rich (sourdough bread/Ghirardelli Milk Chocolate Squares with Caramel Filling versus Legal Seafood lobsters):
Oh, the spelling bee finals were as good as the Celtics!
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ESSENTIAL READING
* The New York Times on the failure of the Biden administration to gain actual leverage over the Saudis, symbolized by the upcoming presidential kowtow:
The visit represents the triumph of realpolitik over moral outrage, according to foreign policy experts. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Biden has found it necessary to court other energy producers to replace oil from Moscow and stabilize world markets. The group of oil-producing nations called OPEC Plus, led by Saudi Arabia, announced on Thursday that it would increase production modestly in July and August. American officials expect the group to do more in the fall, but it may not be enough to bring down prices at the pump before November’s congressional elections.
The Biden administration had already been stepping up cooperation with Saudi Arabia on a variety of issues even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine roiled world energy markets, particularly in seeking an end to the eight-year-old Saudi-led war in neighboring Yemen. A two-month-old truce was extended on Thursday, and Mr. Biden praised Saudi leaders for their role. “Saudi Arabia demonstrated courageous leadership by taking initiatives early on to endorse and implement terms of the U.N.-led truce,” he said in a statement….
“Saudi Arabia is a critical partner to us in dealing with extremism in the region, in dealing with the challenges posed by Iran, and also I hope in continuing the process of building relationships between Israel and its neighbors both near and further away through the continuation, the expansion of the Abraham Accords,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Wednesday at an event marking the 100th anniversary of Foreign Affairs magazine. He said human rights are still important but “we are addressing the totality of our interests in that relationship.”
* Peggy Noonan on the bigger meaning of the law enforcement failures in Texas:
I’m not saying, “Oh, America was once so wonderful and now it’s not.” I’m saying we are losing old habits of discipline and pride in expertise—of peerlessness. There was a kind of American gleam. If the world called on us—in business, the arts, the military, diplomacy, science—they knew they were going to get help. The grown-ups had arrived, with their deep competence.
America now feels more like people who took the Expedited Three Month Training Course and got the security badge and went to work and formed an affinity group to advocate for change. A people who love to talk, endlessly, about sensitivity, yet aren’t sensitive enough to save the children bleeding out on the other side of the door.
I fear that as a people we’re becoming not only increasingly unimpressive but increasingly unlovable.
My God, I’ve never seen a country so in need of a hero.
* White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is doing her best, and/but whoever decided this was the moment to give her the promotion into the job will have to do some soul searching after reading this New York Post account of how she is trying to finesse the what-did-the-president-know-and-when-did-he-know-it-and-from-whom questions about the baby formula shortage. Prediction: Anita Dunn will step in and stop this fight before too many more rounds.
* Rich Lowry is bored by Donald Trump (but don’t miss the “to be sure” paragraph).
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