Who Wants a Fake Ron Klain Memo?
The beloved FAKE Ron Klain memos are back today.
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TO: JRB
FROM: Ron Klain
DATE: 1/5/22
RE: When the path ahead looks like a snowy Virginia highway
As we say in the Hoosier State, Mr. President, if you live long enough, you will see pigs fly.
Bowing to the needs of his party and, perhaps decency, President Trump canceled his media event on January 6.
We both know that there’s a good chance you won’t be the Democratic nominee in 2024. In fact, let’s be honest: the odds are better that Trump will be his party’s nominee than you will be ours.
I know we are focused on governing, but by almost every metric (fundraising, grassroots, message) Trump has a more formidable political operation than we do, as this essential reading New York Times overview of his efforts makes clear.
I don’t know if it is Susie Wiles or what/who, but it appears we might have to consider applying a new (and previously unimaginable…) word to your predecessor: disciplined.
We have long believed that the best way to handle Trump – practically and psychologically – was to ignore him.
That might not be possible any more.
Even with Trump’s nixing his Thursday event, and despite Mark Halperin’s best efforts, tomorrow is shaping up to be a day of division and hyper partisanship, largely thanks to Trump.
We can’t pretend away, insult away, or cajole away Trump’s hold on the nearly half the country (and on nearly all Republican elected officials) – a hold that is standing in the way of our getting much done.
Yes, there are divisions within the Democratic Party. But there’s a reason that Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and you all ran for president promising to make bipartisan unity the centerpiece of your time in the Oval Office.
In my spare time over the holidays, I was looking at a New Yorker profile of me from early in the administration, the kind of piece I stopped cooperating with long ago.
At the time, it all seemed good, but these words from the article are now, frankly, chilling. The through line of Susan Glasser’s story: I was the most experienced and best qualified person ever to assume the job.
Here’s how she summarized what we were dealing with back then:
The new Administration is a month old this week, and so far it’s clear only that it will need all of that experience, and a whole lot of luck besides, to dig out from under Trump’s mess: the raging pandemic, catastrophic unemployment, a country still riven by the recent election and Trump’s explosive Presidency.
Substitute in “catastrophic inflation and supply chain issues” for “catastrophic unemployment” and, well, not much has changed.
And, ugh, this:
“The Biden White House reflects Joe Biden,” Klain told me, in a conversation this week. “And that’s an effort to try to be uniting. It’s an effort to try to pull people together. It’s an effort to be professionals, to bring experience to things, to bring expertise to challenges. I mean, I just hope that what we’re doing here as a staff reflects what he said he’d do as President. I think it does. But I think, ultimately, the tone always comes from the top.”
This paragraph now seems quaint:
Will life be back to normal by July [of 2021], as Dr. Anthony Fauci said recently, or not until December, as Biden said the other day? Republicans are already blasting the new Administration’s “mixed messages” on covid, and the question of where it stands on reopening schools. Democrats, meanwhile, fear that Biden’s promises to enact liberal priorities such as immigration reform, college-debt relief, and gun control are dead on arrival in Congress—if they even get as far as Capitol Hill.
I have to say that this new, dark Politico story about our evolved/evolving PR strategy on the pandemic is, if anything, a little too optimistic:
Besieged by the fast-spreading Omicron variant, the White House is racing to limit the fallout from record cases swamping the nation — an explosion that’s strained hospitals, snarled travel and raised the specter of widespread economic disruptions. The administration has fast-tracked Covid-19 treatments to hard-hit states and pledged emergency personnel to medical centers shorthanded by the waves of infection sweeping through their staffs. They’ve done it all while juggling immense political pressure from fellow Democrats to maintain some semblance of social normalcy lest the party be hit even further by pandemic fatigue among voters.
The new reality has further darkened the mood among White House aides already frustrated by the lack of progress toward ending a pandemic many initially believed could be dispatched within a year. It’s also accelerated the administration’s pivot toward preparing people to live with the virus indefinitely. In interviews, officials described the next few weeks as a triage operation focused on containing the reverberations of the surge well enough to avert breakdowns in essential services, mass school closures and overrun hospitals….
Yet even as the president sought to project calm, he conceded there was widespread confusion among Americans about the virus's spread. And health officials inside and outside his administration privately acknowledge that there’s little new left for the federal government to do but hold on and hope the worst is over soon.
The top of Drudge this morning is, frankly, a nightmare:
And given what the teachers unions in Chicago are doing, we might have to finally take the step we have resisted and call them out. We have cast our lot with keeping schools open, and the House of Labor is the biggest obstacle to that goal right now.
We are not going to be able to deliver our promised massive January expansion of testing capacity, on either at-home tests and pop-up facilities. The press and Republicans will positively kill us on this. But better to delay than to launch it poorly.
Retailers are about to make things worse for us from a PR and political point of view, per the Wall Street Journal:
Prices are going up for some of the cheapest and most popular at-home Covid-19 test kits in the U.S.
Walmart Inc. and Kroger Co. are raising their prices for BinaxNOW at-home rapid tests, after the expiration of a deal with the White House to sell the test kits at cost for $14.
The two U.S. retail giants and Amazon.com Inc. agreed with the Biden administration last summer to discount the tests, which are made by Abbott Laboratories ABT -2.35% and generally cost $24 or more for a box with two tests….
The deal with the White House expired in December, and Walmart said this week that it is raising the kits’ price to $19.98 a box. Kroger now sells them for $23.99. The BinaxNOW tests aren’t currently available on Amazon.
Representatives for Walmart and Kroger said they fulfilled their commitment to sell tests at cost for three months and are taking steps to make tests more available. The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment.
And the pressure from our Hill allies on all this is growing. The Politico story also gets at that a bit:
Democrats privately acknowledge that those missteps — along with the canceled flights that stranded thousands over the holiday — mean that even absent harsh restrictions and school shutdowns, Omicron’s spread could continue to undercut a midterm strategy once predicated on a clean defeat of the virus.
Fearful of what that portends for November, other Democrats have pushed for Biden to take an even more prominent role in messaging through the crisis.
We both know that that isn’t going to happen.
So we are reliant on Chuck and Nancy.
Here are the problems with that.
The Speaker apparently can’t stop the flood of retirements in the caucus, which feeds both the press narrative of the inevitable demise of our majority and more retirements. There could be many additional ones, including in some districts we will likely lose without an incumbent in place.
And Senator Schumer can’t seem to solve the Senate puzzle right now (on BBB, voting rights, or pretty much anything), meaning no matter how long we delay the State of the Union (we are still looking to maybe do it unprecedentedly late in March), we still might be looking at having passed nothing significant before then since infrastructure.
Here’s another reality: making changes to the filibuster that don’t actually allow us to pass our agenda is the worst of both worlds – we create more partisan warfare, the left would be even angrier, and we get nothing to show for it.
Also, as Marc Thiessen points out, do we really want to get rid of the filibuster?
Democrats should think back on all the conservative policies they delayed and derailed in the minority thanks to the filibuster — such as entitlement reforms, immigration reforms, lawsuit reforms, health-care reforms, budget cuts, expanded gun rights, protections for unborn life and defunding Planned Parenthood — and then imagine all that and more being enacted by simple majority vote when Republicans win back the House, the Senate and the presidency — which they likely will in the not-too-distant future.
If Democrats like the Supreme Court Harry M. Reid wrought them, they will love a filibuster-free, McConnell-led Senate.
And we head towards the midterms with a lot of issues threatening to be a double whammy – energizing to the Trump base and depressing to our base.
Take immigration and this painful Washington Post story:
A year after taking office, Biden’s efforts to unwind the Trump immigration policies he sharply condemned have been messy, sporadic and politically fraught. After moving quickly to curb some of his predecessor's most controversial approaches, Biden has, in some key ways, adopted a more restrictive posture toward migrants in recent months.
As the joke goes at the Four Seasons breakfast room: Joe Biden’s immigration policies have indeed united America – nobody is happy with them.
Ditto on climate change.
A few more things before I let you go.
* We have to figure out how and when to unfurl our batch of Fed picks. Their diversity and qualifications will not instantly end inflation, but the announcement will be a strong day for us with the Gang of 500.
* I continue to devote a great deal of time to addressing the issues in the Office of the Veep. I can’t say there is meaningful progress there, but I can say her team is not necessarily helping the cause every day in every way.
* Media Affairs found this item to give you something to talk to the grandkids about, which they describe as “a classic Page Six item”:
Kim Kardashian has seemingly unfollowed Miley Cyrus on Instagram following the singer’s live New Year’s Eve special with Pete Davidson.
We will do national security stuff in the briefing. Tony has some good news on Europe and Putin, and the North Korea thing seems ok.
Have a great workout.