Grease Us Again!

#48: Biden hasn't reinvented the presidency, but he's reinvented the 'beat sweetener'

The Great Regreasing: A strange series of news reports -- one in the Washington Post, one in Business Insider and one in the Wall Street Journal -- have appeared to tell us about allegedly brilliant process innovations in the Biden White House without much evidence that they’ve actually made any difference. **

-- WaPo takes us inside the administration's Tiger Teams, a term that refers to "diverse groups of experts who are tackling a specific problem [Ukraine] and that suggests alertness and a readiness to pounce”! They’ve been “quietly gaming out how the United States would respond to a range of jarring scenarios, from a limited show of force to a full-scale, mass-casualty invasion." They've “staged two multi-hour tabletop exercises—including one with Cabinet officials—to bring the scenarios to life”! They’ve “assembled a playbook” that “outlines an array of swift potential responses." Despite the alertness and readiness to pounce and the playbooks, they don’t seem to have deterred Putin, but no need to get into that.

-- Business Insider tells us that Biden is "reinventing the way the White House works." Specifically, “the Cabinet has been transformed from a bureaucratic afterthought into a secret weapon.” Cabinet secretaries now represent the President in dealing with lawmakers. They “made 2,155 calls to members of Congress” in Biden’s first year (“according to data the White House provided exclusively to Insider”).  They “travel around the country, to help push the broader administration message.” And the lede: Once a week, a random pair of them have lunch with Ron Klain! Klain “uses the sessions to talk shop with the agency heads, check in on their families.”

-- The WSJ’s equally riveting narrative explains how the administration “changed its approach following the mishandled Australia submarine deal and withdrawal from Afghanistan.” Looks like they’re getting better! European Union officials “say they appreciate that the Biden administration has reached out to European Union officials.” Biden has “stepped up intelligence-sharing about Russia’s activities.” He’s held calls with French President Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Scholz. He’s even (brace yourself) been “quizzing advisers on individual components of sanction packages and how they would be sequenced …”

You see the pattern. Three points:

1. There’s something a little odd —maybe innovative!— about getting reporters to brag on how your team is getting it done before you actually win the game. Normally the press would lionize Biden's "Tiger Teams" after the latest Cuban Missile Crisis, or whatever, was successfully resolveded, no?

2. Journalists ofen run credulous, upbeat, PRish pieces during the early months of a new administration -- stories known as ‘beat sweetners’ or ‘source greasers’ — when they’re trying to suck up to new officials who will then give them inside details. But the Biden administration has been different: It’s been an impenetrable vault during its first year -- no stories of infighting, no ‘tick tock’ about who slammed what door during which argument. By now the press must be desperate for insider accounts. Meanwhile, the Biden White House is desperate for good press. The result seems to be a tacit deal that's produced a second round of beat sweetners, over a full year into the administration. When the Biden White House talks about "reset" they seem to be saying "Grease Us Again!"

3. Some of Biden's allegedly clever innovations seem designed to work around his particular limitations. I’m not one who thinks Biden is demented -- but it's true that few, maybe none, of the improved habits in that Business Insider piece ("reinventing the way the White House works"!) involve actual interactions with the President. They involve lunch with Klain. If the President doesn’t have the energy to lobby individual Congressmen, or to tour the country pushing his policies — well, have cabinet secretaries do it! This doesn’t seem a breakthrough so much as a ‘cope’ — a way to try and run a presidency when the President is too old to do much.

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** — Emphasis added

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It’s All Mayorkas’ Fault: I finally managed to read George Packer's much-praised Atlantic piece on the botched Afghan withdrawal. It is a bit short on what I wanted, which was dirt on Biden administration fuck-ups in Washington, D.C.. Few ticks are tocked, nor are many names named (except a hapless Biden speechwriter named Carlyn Reichel). Instead, the piece is long on harrowing tales of left-behind Afghans struggling to escape. But what struck me was this passage:

The official moved on to the larger problem. National-security officials were in favor of evacuations, she said—but the president’s political advisers worried that the right would hammer Biden for resettling thousands of Muslims while historic numbers of Central American refugees were already overrunning the southern border. The Afghan evacuees would become part of one giant immigration disaster, exploited hourly on Fox News, when the administration still had to pass a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill. “Remember, this kind of crisis was coming at the worst possible time,” a senior administration official told me. “In the spring there was wall-to-wall coverage of the border—‘Who are these people coming into our country?’—and at the same time we’re contemplating bringing in tens of thousands of Afghans.

In other words, Biden’s mismanagment of the border with Mexico is in large part responsible for his mismanagement of the evacuation in Afghanistan. The idea that the way to stop this unfolding double-bank-shot tragedy was to stop the “overruning of the southern border” seems never to have occurred to the White House.

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Vulgar Marxism Dept.: Why have so many voters been willing to stick with Trump all through his post-election (really, post-Covid) wackiness? Is it just a semi-permanent culture thing? Maybe not. The last few years of this median household income chart suggest an alternate answer: Man, the Trump years were good for the average family, at least until the pandemic hit.