Pete Buttigieg wasn’t exactly feeling it. It was late, and aides from the White House had just provided him with some cryptic guidance during their preparation call for his appearances on Sunday shows on July 24. They said, “We’re not taking any swings.”
The transportation secretary was still reeling from the latest death of a reconciliation bill tackling climate change when the month of July came to a close, as were most Democrats.
This was a bill that he and so many others had hoped would address climate change. Buttigieg was feeling disappointed and despondent as a result of the possibility of losing the tax credits for electric vehicles, which he had worked on the most closely, as well as the larger aims, such as reducing carbon emissions.
Buttigieg, one of the Cabinet secretaries closest to President Joe Biden who was directing some of the policies involved — and a top TV pitchman — did not know how much was on the verge of altering because the circle of individuals who were in the know had been kept so tight.
One of Vice President Biden’s most trusted advisors admitted that “there was a sense that things had stagnated.” People had the impression that what they were seeing was different from what they had anticipated seeing.
The upside for Democrats is that after a year and a half of false starts and breakdowns, they have stumbled into having a pile of good news right before midterm campaigning really picks up, and just as the average gas price has fallen below $4, and just as Donald Trump’s last week included having the FBI search Mar-a-Lago and invoking the Fifth Amendment hundreds of times to the New York attorney general.
Democrats say this is the upside for a year and a half of false starts and breakdowns
Three days after Buttigieg’s appearances on television, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called Vice President Joe Biden to inform him that he had successfully negotiated an agreement with West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and revitalised the President’s agenda.
Biden and his team are rushing to reset the image they allowed to settle in of a doddering president wiling away his days in the Oval Office as time passed him by.
This deal, which included reductions in the deficit and the largest investments in combating climate change the United States has ever made, has now passed through Congress and is headed to the desk of the President.
With the passage of this deal, which included reductions in the deficit and the largest investments in combating climate change the United States has ever made.
CNN spoke with thirty dozen White House aides, members of Congress and top staff, and top political operatives on how Vice President Biden is racing against the clock to change people’s perceptions of his presidency.
It is a race to reverse the course of history by preserving the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in the midterm elections that will take place in November, and — just as important for the President — preventing any further defections from within his own party as he prepares for the reelection campaign that he is planning to launch early in the new year.
Some people, even within the administration, believe that the West Wing is trying to put a positive spin on a President who wasn’t doing much.
However, aides who were most deeply involved point to calibrated, multi-dimensional, simultaneous strategies that are frequently overlooked by those who are only focused on Biden jawboning his way through Oval Office meetings.
The goal was to ensure that Buttigieg would maintain his composure throughout those Sunday show interviews.
To increase the likelihood of the CHIPS and Science Act being passed, the Department of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo travelled to Capitol Hill to participate in intensive national security briefings about China.
There was a group of aides who huddled together by the sofa in the Roosevelt Room to discuss how to feed an echo chamber of prominent liberals who were criticising Senate Republicans for initially refusing to pass the veterans burn pits health bill out of anger at the reconciliation deal.
After that, they discussed how to get the tweets that they helped generate in front of wavering Democrats to convince them to give up their objections for the sake of helping mess with Republicans.
And there was quiet coordination with Manchin and Schumer as Biden refrained from declaring the climate emergency that many activists and Democratic officials were demanding, even though they knew that doing so would result in the President once again getting raked on social media by his own supporters.
Although there were multiple different possibilities planned on how to declare a climate emergency, Biden’s aides claim that this gamble best represents their approach:
The passage of the law achieved a much larger outcome that cannot simply be undone by a subsequent president, even though many of Biden’s supporters felt a great deal of disappointment at the time.
According to the consultant, putting everything together “was not something that happened overnight.” “Plays the long game” and “truly does have the ability to look ahead and recognise that you’re going to go through the tough periods to get there” is how Biden has been described.
Importantly, Vice President Biden was careful not to place excessive demands on any of the bills being considered. For example, he did not push for the implementation of universal background checks as part of the gun control legislation, nor did he insist that his entire Build Back Better agenda be approved after reconciliation.
An influential member of the Democratic caucus in the Senate stated that “this President, by not allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good, helped make so many of these things happen.”
Manchin wouldn’t have been the 50th vote without Schumer, but they say there wouldn’t have been 49 out of 50 votes there without Biden.
The climate provisions are a perfect example of where the White House feels that Biden’s role in setting the direction is being underappreciated:
Manchin wouldn’t have been the 50th vote without Schumer. They will remember that Obama was unsuccessful in getting 50 of the 59 Democrats in the Senate to support his cap-and-trade scheme.
Biden “built a climate plan that fused 49 (Democrats) together and the fusion stuck all the way,” according to a senior White House aide.
This was accomplished by focusing on investments in clean energy projects that brought labour on board and tend to a network of unions to keep speaking up in support of the plan.
This network of unions was similar to the network of veterans’ groups they were in touch with on the burn pits bill.
“It is abundantly clear that Manchin is necessary for this. But if you don’t follow Biden’s strategy, you won’t even get one vote closer.
Nevertheless, after the talks were concluded, Schumer made his first stop at the office of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, where he informed her that they had to discuss the matter in a private setting without any staff present.
The conditions were acceptable to her. The next call was to Biden, who had just a week and a half earlier given Schumer his OK during a call, and he was the one who received the news that it was completed.
Biden is said to have proven the theory of his presidency along the way, which is that major legislation can still actually move through Washington, that it can happen with bipartisan agreement even while there are simultaneous partisan fights, and that what may seem like outdated rules of governing and politics actually still matter in this age of instant gratification.
Close advisers say that Biden has proven his theory along the way. That the appropriate response to individuals yelling or threatening you is not to yell back, regardless of what members of the Republican Party or his own party may have said about him.
Aides in the White House frequently bring up the people who have branded Vice President Biden “naive” to dispel the perception that he is.
Biden and his advisors frequently use the phrase “met this moment” to describe how he and his friends have arrived at this point in time.
Some people in the West Wing have been sending around a line from his South Carolina victory speech in 2020 when luck and circumstance as well as strategy and perseverance suddenly resurrected then-candidate Biden after it seemed as though he was finished:
“For those that have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign.” In the speech, he said, “For those that have been knocked down, counted out, left behind, this is your campaign.”
“We can’t do it all the time, and we can’t do it a lot of the time, but there are times when we can come together, and we should.”
“We can’t do it all the time, and we can’t do it a lot of the time.” Late in the week that just passed, a senior official at the White House stated that this sends an important message to the public.
Frustrations Of The Summertime
Before they cautioned Buttigieg against going too hard, Biden’s aides had been planning his own big speech at the end of July, in Wisconsin.
However, aides to Governor Tony Evers, who is in a tight reelection fight, urged him not to come so that they could avoid being together.
Biden’s aides then changed their plans and decided to caution Buttigieg against going too hard. Aides in the White House had agreed to go ahead with it nonetheless, but then they discovered that to implement the necessary security precautions, they would have to scrap the Oshkosh Air Show, which is very popular in the area.
Now, that significant address by Biden is scheduled to take place not long after Labor Day. Aides are preparing a hard-hitting kick-off for the midterm election campaign, in which the President will boast about tangible, long-talked-about wins such as lowering the costs of prescription drugs and gun restrictions, while at the same time hammering Republicans for being extremists who are in the pocket of special interests.
The chasm that Biden is attempting to climb out of is quite large, and it is obscure. Top Democratic operatives were heard in the background discreetly handing around numbers that left them depressed but not surprised about the time that the Wisconsin speech was scheduled to take place.
In Delaware, the state that Biden represented for 36 years in the Senate and where they named the main rest stop and the train station for him years before he was elected president, his disapproval rate was greater than his approval rating.
In some places, the numbers have been far worse. In state after state and district after district, there was a discrepancy of up to 20 to 25 points between how voters felt about Joe Biden and how they felt about the Democratic candidates for governor, Senate, and House.
The Democratic candidate is in the lead in two internal polls for the August special election for a House district where Biden edged out Trump in the 2020 election; however, Biden’s approval is in the mid-30s. The election is for a seat in the House.
Throughout the entire summer, Democratic focus groups all around the country came back with the same concern about Biden: It seemed as though he wasn’t even trying to deal with inflation or really anything else.
Approval ratings continued their downward spiral, with one operative in a high-profile contest saying at the end of the previous month that “there’s no bottom” to the slide.
When asked about Biden’s poll ratings, the senator for Arizona, Mark Kelly, claimed he was unaware of how poor they were.
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, another one of the Democrats’ most endangered incumbents, responded to a question about whether she would be dragged down by Biden’s low approval rating by saying, “I can just tell you I don’t take Nevadans for granted.” This allowed her to avoid answering the question directly.
Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan said, “It’s a time where everybody’s been through so much, and even though their own personal situation may be fine, there’s a lot of anxiety in the country,” as she attempted to explain why so many people had turned against Joe Biden even though other Democrats and the Democratic agenda remained popular. “It’s a time where everybody’s been through so much,” she said.
In the weeks after the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, when nothing else seemed to be going in the right direction, a sense of disillusionment crept its way into the Oval Office as well.
“When you’re the president, people look to you to vent their anger and frustration. And it’s difficult when you’re the most powerful person in the world, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” said another White House aide.
The Political Climate Has Undergone a Shift
According to aides, the passage of the gun bill in the wake of the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was a critical event that swung the pendulum in either direction.
Not only did it demonstrate that Republicans and Democrats could reach a compromise on an intractable topic, but it also demonstrated a level of zeal on Biden’s part that had not been apparent in the weeks leading up to the summit.
Since his time as a senator, during which he was instrumental in the passage of the most recent significant gun control legislation, the President has placed a high personal priority on this matter.
According to aides, the assassination of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, was yet another significant jolt internally, although it was mostly lost in the avalanche of other news.
An advisor described that event as a “proof of concept” moment for the President, who had a lengthy resume but not a great deal of experience serving as commander-in-chief.
Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and a representative from New York, stated that “the Beltway crowd rejected him as out of touch.”
“The programme that he directed was extremely well received by the people of the United States… Now that these victories have been achieved, President Biden’s approval rating will only be able to catch up to the popularity of the agenda that he has put forward.
Optimistic Democratic operatives believe that if Biden can start to move up a few points, then candidates who were holding even against Republicans while he was in the 30s would actually have a shot at winning.
However, they are not certain that there is sufficient time to change the way the public perceives them, and Republicans are still looking for ways to make him an anchor.
According to Senator Rick Scott of Florida, who chairs the campaign arm of the Republican Party in the Senate, “None of them want to declare they’re with Biden.”
“I believe that they are consistently working to put some distance between themselves and Biden,” the speaker said.
The shift in energy that has occurred over the past two weeks may be overestimated. There are still some dysfunctional areas within the staff.
The close klatch of ageing advisers continues to be mostly opaque for the rest of the staff, and even numerous high-level aides have stated that they are perplexed as to why decisions are so difficult to make or why the President continues to adhere to his limited public schedule.
A few weeks ago, there was a rumour going around the West Wing that the author Jon Meacham was about to officially join the White House staff as a top communications staffer.
This encapsulated the aides’ sense that ideas were being thrown against the wall. In typical Vice President Biden fashion, a decision on student loan cancellation that was initially promised in the spring will almost certainly be pushed all the way to the deadline on August 31.
And regardless of where it lands, it will end up frustrating some on the left for not going far enough.
Still convincing his party over 2024 Raul Ruiz, a physician and California congressman who was a key proponent of the burn pits legislation, stood outside the White House after the bill signing on Wednesday and recalled how he’d started talking with Biden about the issue all the way back in 2018, a few minutes before a speech to buck up the House Democrats during the Trump years. Ruiz was recalling how he’d started talking with Biden about the issue all the way back in 2018, shortly
“People are going to start realising that Joe Biden is the one responsible for this. “The challenge is that, of course, there is always a lag time between planning and implementation,” Ruiz explained.
However, he will continue to hold office for the following two years. And when all of these benefits begin to take effect and people’s lives have been better, then he will remain in government for another four years.
Even among the other leaders of the Democratic Party, Biden still needs to do some convincing. During their primary discussion, two New York members of Congress who were running against each other in the same election were caught hesitating on whether or not they would endorse Joe Biden for reelection.
Both quickly recanted their statements, but one of them, Representative Jerry Nadler, has told people that he thinks the question is a trap set by the Republican party to trick Democrats into discussing the future of an unpopular president rather than the more pressing questions regarding the Democratic agenda and what he perceives to be the threat posed by the Republican party.
Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota told CNN that even though he is ecstatic about all of Biden’s recent successes, he stands by the statements he made toward the end of the previous month arguing that Biden should not run for reelection. Phillips is a member of the House of Representatives in Minnesota.
He stated that “tens” of colleagues have reached out to him to let him know that they concur with him, and several members have also told CNN in private that they are concerned about a rush of similar announcements urging Biden to step aside if Republicans still come out of the midterm elections with significant victories.
Phillips stated, “My viewpoint or feelings have not altered one iota as a consequence of this.” “You couldn’t have picked a better time.
The President of the United States himself used the term “bridge” to describe his role, stating that he would serve as a generational bridge. After having served as the most important and remarkable bridge during a time when the country was literally teetering, I’d like to see Joe Biden go out on top.
After winning the presidency when few thought he could and scoring a legislative record that few modern presidents can match, Biden and those in his orbit are wondering what it will take to get his own party to cheer him into reelection rather than continuing to circulate doubts. Biden won the presidency when few thought he could, and he scored a legislative record that few modern presidents can match.
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“It is important that people take him at his word. According to one of Vice President Biden’s most trusted advisers, “He is normally someone who tells you exactly what he is going to do.” “The kind of record you race on is the kind of record that consists of achievements and accomplishments,”
