news WSJ: How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge

[VOSS]

 

During the 2020 presidential primary, Jill Biden campaigned so extensively across Iowa that she held events in more counties than her husband—a fact her press secretary at the time, Michael LaRosa, touted to a local reporter.

 

His superior in the Biden campaign quickly chided him. As the three rode in a minivan through the state's cornfields, Anthony Bernal, then a deputy campaign manager and chief of staff to Jill Biden, pressed LaRosa to contact the reporter again and play down any comparison in campaign appearances between Joe Biden, then 77, and his wife, who is eight years his junior. Her energetic schedule only highlighted her husband's more plodding pace, LaRosa recalls being told.

 

The message from Biden's team was clear. "The more you talk her up, the more you make him look bad," LaRosa said.

 

The small correction foreshadowed how Biden's closest aides and advisers would manage the limitations of the oldest president in U.S. history during his four years in office.

 

To adapt the White House around the needs of a diminished leader, they told visitors to keep meetings focused. Interactions with senior Democratic lawmakers and some cabinet members—including powerful secretaries such as Defense's Lloyd Austin and Treasury's Janet Yellen—were infrequent or grew less frequent. Some legislative leaders had a hard time getting the president's ear at key moments, including ahead of the U.S.'s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan.

 

Presidents always have gatekeepers. But in Biden's case, the walls around him were higher and the controls greater, according to Democratic lawmakers, donors and aides who worked for Biden and other administrations. There were limits over who Biden spoke with, limits on what they said to him and limits around the sources of information he consumed.

 

Throughout his presidency, a small group of aides stuck close to Biden to assist him, especially when traveling or speaking to the public. "They body him to such a high degree," a person who witnessed it said, adding that the "hand holding" is unlike anything other recent presidents have had.

 

The White House operated this way even as the president and his aides pressed forward with his re-election bid—which unraveled spectacularly after his halting performance in a June debate with Donald Trump made his mental acuity an insurmountable issue. Vice President Kamala Harris replaced him on the Democratic ticket and was decisively defeated by Trump in a shortened campaign—leaving Democrats to debate whether their chances were undercut by Biden's refusal to yield earlier. 
 

The president's slide has been hard to overlook. While preparing last year for his interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated Biden's handling of classified documents, the president couldn't recall lines that his team discussed with him. At events, aides often repeated instructions to him, such as where to enter or exit a stage, that would be obvious to the average person. Biden's team tapped campaign co-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, a Hollywood mogul, to find a voice coach to improve the president's fading warble. 
 

Biden, now 82, has long operated with a tightknit inner circle of advisers. The protective culture inside the White House was intensified because Biden started his presidency at the height of the Covid pandemic. His staff took great care to prevent him from catching the virus by limiting in-person interactions with him. But the shell constructed for the pandemic was never fully taken down, and his advanced age hardened it. 
 

The strategies to protect Biden largely worked—until June 27, when Biden stood on an Atlanta debate stage with Trump, searching for words and unable to complete his thoughts on live television. Much of the Democratic establishment had accepted the White House line that Biden was able to take the fight to Trump, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary.

 

Biden, staffed with advisers since he became a senator at age 30, came to the White House with a small team of fiercely loyal, long-serving aides who knew him and Washington so well that they could be particularly effective proxies. They didn't tolerate criticism of Biden's performance or broader dissent within the Democratic Party, especially when it came to the president's decision to run for a second term.

 

Biden's team also insulated him on the campaign trail. In the summer of 2023, one prominent Democratic donor put together a small event for Biden's re-election bid. The donor was shocked when a campaign official told him that attendees shouldn't expect to have a free ranging question-and-answer session with the president. Instead, the organizer was told to send in two or three questions ahead of time that Biden would answer. 

 

At some events, the Biden campaign printed the pre-approved questions on notecards and then gave donors the cards to read the questions. Even with all these steps, Biden made flubs, which confounded the donors who knew that Biden had the questions ahead of time.

 

Some donors said they noticed how staff stepped in to mask other signs of decline. Throughout his presidency—and especially later in the term—Biden was assisted by a small group of aides who were laser focused on him in a far different way than when he was vice president, or how former presidents Bill Clinton or Obama were staffed during their presidencies, people who have witnessed their interactions said.

 

During the 2020 campaign, Biden had calls with John Anzalone, his pollster, during which the two had detailed conversations.

 

By the 2024 campaign, the pollsters weren't talking to the president about their findings, and instead sent memos that went to top campaign staff.

 

Biden's pollsters didn't meet with him in person and saw little evidence that the president was personally getting the data that they were sending him, according to the people.

 

People close to the president said he relied on Mike Donilon, one of Biden's core inner circle advisers. With a background in polling, Donilon could sift through the information and present it to the president.

 

Bates said that Biden stayed abreast of polling data.

 

But this summer, Democratic insiders became alarmed by the way Biden described his own polling, publicly characterizing the race as a tossup when polls released in the weeks after the disastrous June debate consistently showed Trump ahead. They worried he wasn't getting an unvarnished look at his standing in the race.

 

Those fears intensified on July 11, when Biden's top advisers met behind closed doors with Democratic senators, where the advisers laid out a road map for Biden's victory. The message from the advisers was so disconnected from public polling—which showed Trump leading Biden nationally—that it left Democratic senators incredulous. It spurred Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) to speak to Biden directly, according to people familiar with the matter, hoping to pierce what the senators saw as a wall erected by Donilon to shield Biden from bad information. Donilon didn't respond to requests for comment. 
 

On July 13, Biden held an uncomfortable call with a group of Democratic lawmakers called the New Democrat Coalition, aimed at reassuring them about his ability to stay in the race.  

 

The president told participants that polling showed he was doing fine. He became angry when challenged, according to lawmakers on the call. At one point, Biden looked up and abruptly told the group he had to go to church. Some lawmakers on the call believed someone behind the camera was shutting it down.

Biden dropped out of the race eight days later.

 

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[vuelve88]

Did it really function, though? 

[americanlife]

He will go down as worse than Trump.

[Virgos Groove]

The Democratic Party just needs to crumble and whither away at this point. Doing a Weekend at Biden's during such an important election is treasonous.

[Flanders]

35 minutes ago, americanlife said:

He will go down as worse than Trump.

No he won't. His administration has been really efficient. Meanwhile Trump changed the Supreme Court in a disastrous way

[nadiamendell]

Everyone who pushed this ailing candidate that nobody wanted on to us in 2020 should never hold public office again. It's absolutely insane. The last 4 years have felt like nobody is running the ship. 

[Maxxxine]

I really wanna know who the people were behind the curtain, pulling the puppet's strings.

[Cesar]

3 hours ago, Flanders said:

No he won't. His administration has been really efficient. Meanwhile Trump changed the Supreme Court in a disastrous way

 

 

if his administration was so efficient, how did we end up with trump again?

[Flanders]

1 hour ago, Cesar said:

 

 

if his administration was so efficient, how did we end up with trump again?

Do you know what efficient means?  I'm not talking about the election or anything related to that. Yeah he's been a mid president but at least his administration got stuff done, to suggest he's worse than trump is just silly