The Biden administration doesn’t leak much, so I was a little surprised to finally see the typical New York Times behind-the-scenes explainer on the inner workings of its decision-making process. The piece is a garbled mess, at once insisting that “Mr. Biden is gripped by a sense of urgency that leaves him prone to flares of impatience” and that “on policy issues, Mr. Biden, 78, takes days or weeks to make up his mind as he examines and second-guesses himself and others.”
Perhaps you can chalk that up to inconsistencies in Biden’s character, meaning both things can be accurate, just as Biden can simultaneously be “short-tempered” but “never erupts into fits of rage,” and is “prone to displays of unexpected warmth” towards his staff.
Overall, what I see here is an effort to peel back the veil that relies on a paucity of sources and interesting details. The detail I found most interesting had to do with Biden’s approach to climate policy.
On the morning of March 31, Mr. Biden was in the Oval Office with Gina McCarthy, his climate czar, and Ali Zaidi, her deputy, to talk about methane emissions and the effort to reclaim mines. The aides wanted to talk about the global effect of policies that they believed he should enact.
He had different kinds of questions.
During a lengthy discussion, Mr. Biden quizzed them on how his climate policy would influence specific workers in Pennsylvania, his home state. How would all of this affect earth-moving workers, fabricators, those pouring concrete, derrick operators, plumbers and pipe fitters, and licensed truckers, he asked.
“We walked through each of those specific occupations, those specific tasks that people do,” Mr. Zaidi said. “And he probed on, you know, ‘And how much do these folks make?’ and ‘How many of them are there in southwestern Pennsylvania?’ and ‘OK, you told me about this geothermal resource, but does this geothermal resource exist in West Virginia?’”
This anecdote has a named source, Mr. Zaidi, so it’s not a leak but rather a message the White House wants to deliver. Nonetheless, you can see how Biden does a basic gut-check on how macro policies are going to affect everyday working men and women, and also some transparency into his political instincts. He wants to know how the policies will impact his prospects in Pennsylvania, but also how they’ll look to Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose support in a 50-50 Senate is critical to Biden’s entire agenda.
Insofar as the article is critical, it focuses on Biden’s lengthy decision-making process which can have obvious drawbacks. But even here there’s a schizoid flavor to the reporting. Allegedly, Biden can be merciless to aides who aren’t prepared to answer sometimes arcane questions, but he’s also impatient with too much detail. Again, both things can be true, but that somewhat lessens the strength of either characterization. It sounds like he wants a lot of detail but not a lot of jargon. And that doesn’t seem like either a major revelation about the president or much of a flaw.
Part of the problem with this piece probably comes down to the difficulty in getting friends of Biden to dish insider details or criticisms. This leads the reporters to stretch to make the little they have into something more newsworthy. They found some interesting tidbits but their product is mostly unsurprising and therefore kind of boring. The effort to sex it up, fell flat.
The white house press corps never cease to amaze me. And not in a good way.
I saw All The Presidents Men in Bombay in the late 70s. It made me think how the press was able to bring down the most powerful man on earth!
To see the current condition of the press now is such a tragedy from the heights it commanded earlier. Also the deeply held racism in many whites has been such an eye opener from the world portrayed in Hollywood movies!
Stories like this NYT one put me to mind of someone trying to convince you of their certainty of what’s represented in a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle after they’ve managed to put together 50 pieces of the puzzle.
I saw that NYT headline and muttered to myself “not today, Satan.” I’m glad I made that decision, because it sounds like the writers were trying to make a mountain out of less than a molehill, stir up drama where none exists, and generally play the patented “NYT mean girls” role they love so much.
I am so glad I stopped subscribing to that paper. When you stop reading it for a few weeks and then revisit it, you suddenly grasp just how bad it truly is.
Before making pretty much any decision, Sen. George Mitchell used to ask himself (paraphrasing only slightly), “If someone at a town hall meeting in Maine asked me why I did this, could I explain it to them?”. It sounds like Biden has a similar approach.