Dysfunction in the Biden Whitehouse

 CNN:

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Biden and his inner circle get weekly readouts of the metrics on local newspaper coverage of his speeches, how long and for what he was covered on cable, but also videos that staff post on Twitter and other social media interactions. Those reports go on the piles with internal memos from pollsters saying Biden isn’t breaking through in traditional news outlets and that the people who are engaged are mostly voters who’ve already made up their minds.

But beneath this struggle to break through is a deeper dysfunction calcified among aides who largely started working together only through Zoom screens and still struggle to get in rhythm. They’re still finding it hard to grasp how much their political standing has changed over the last year, and there’s a divide between most of the White House staff and the inner circle who have been around Biden for longer than most of the rest of that staff has been alive. In an email to CNN, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said, “That is not the dynamic in the White House.”

At the center is a president still trying to calibrate himself to the office. The country is pulling itself apart, pandemic infections keep coming, inflation keeps rising, a new crisis on top of new crisis arrives daily and Biden can’t see a way to address that while also being the looser, happier, more sympathetic, lovingly Onion-parody inspiring, aviator-wearing, vanilla chip cone-licking guy – an image that was the core of why he got elected in the first place.

“He has to speak to very serious things,” explained one White House aide, “and you can’t do that getting ice cream.”

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.

Aides and allies worry that the West Wing is making the same mistakes as they tout the White House’s big pivot to inflation – which they know is a defining issue for the midterms – using all the methods Biden and his top advisers keep going back to: A Wall Street Journal op-ed, a basic photo-op Oval Office meeting with the Federal Reserve chairman and Treasury secretary, dispatching Cabinet secretaries for short TV interviews.

Biden’s speech on Thursday night calling for real action on new gun control laws was a departure from many of his recent appearances, complete with a carefully stage managed line up of mournful candles in glass lining his walkway into the East Room.

But even with his intense delivery and repeated return to the word “Enough” and laying out of an aspirational agenda that has little chance in Congress, despite broad support among many Americans outside of Washington, he was more than anything reacting to how the conversation had already taken shape without him. And then, less than an hour after he was done issuing his call to action, Biden left for an early weekend at his beach house in Delaware, without much of a public schedule for days.

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I think a large cross-section of the country has tuned him out.  There have been too many gaffes and blunders to keep up with.