Yeah, this is a White House and administration in TOTAL CONTROL of their messaging.

The reality is that it’s more like there are too many cooks in the kitchen, and the end result is Joe Biden continually looking weak and indecisive – because he is easily led by whoever talks loudest in his ear, and a bunch of staffers who believe that Twitter is the real world.

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.”

What the White House staff, headed by Shadow President Chief of Staff Ron Klain fail to realize, is that the American public knew that Joe Biden was an empty suit that only had a career beyond the Senate because he was tapped to be Barack Obama’s permanent yes man. He was the “Not Bad Orange Man” in the 2020 election. But what they failed to realize is that while Donald Trump was on Twitter a LOT (honestly too much) during his presidency, the rest of the administration wasn’t.

Joe Biden employs "over 70 people on staff” to handle his digital content.

Donald Trump had himself and @DanScavino https://t.co/H8kFqdS8t4

— Charlie Spiering (@charliespiering) June 2, 2022

For a Biden administration that is So Very Online, you would think that they would realize that the one thing that would really make parents mad would be to close schools again. And they have proof of just how the electorate reacted to school issues in the gubernatorial election in Virginia last November. So why would the White House think that not answering a completely legitimate question, posed to their COVID coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, would be a GOOD idea?

I mean, Karine Jean-Pierre is obviously not as skilled as Jen Psaki when it comes to dodge and deflect, but this was a pretty obvious case of “run away, run away!”

On Thursday, COVID Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha appeared alongside Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre for a joint press conference.”

Dr. Jha took the stage first, answering questions related to COVID-19. At the end of his allotted time, a reporter asked him whether he thinks schools should remain open in the fall, but before he had a chance to answer, Jean-Pierre interrupted and ushered him off stage.”

“Dr. do you believe schools will and must be open this coming fall?” a reporter asked.”

“You have to go,” Jean-Pierre told Dr. Jha as he attempted to provide a response, holding her arm out to direct him towards the door.”

“Sorry,” Dr. Jha said to the press gallery as he left.”

What an absolutely chickenshit response by Dr. Jha. How hard is it to say “Yes,” before leaving the podium, even with Jean-Pierre trying to use a hook to pull you off-stage. Anyone who has been paying attention knows the devastation that has already been wrought upon the kids, and anyone with a modicum of common sense at the time of the school closures knew was incoming, but is only just now being acknowledged by the intellectual class on Twitter and in the media, that online school was a massive failure on every single level.

Children’s learning loss in the pandemic isn’t just in reading and math. It’s also in social and emotional skills. In a New York Times survey of 362 school counselors across the U.S., they said students are behind in abilities to learn, cope and relate. https://t.co/CkyUNZ8q0e pic.twitter.com/b3JnHMFdJv

— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 29, 2022

But the Biden administration is so beholden to the teachers’ unions, that they DARE NOT commit to schools being completely open in the fall of 2022. Vaccines have been available for anyone who wants them for well over a year at this point, Omicron burned through the country this winter and conferred natural immunity upon everyone in its path, and yet the Biden White House will not verbally commit to schools being open via their own COVID coordinator.

If there's ONE QUESTION you let the COVID Czar answer, it's that he think their kids should be at school in the Fall of 2022.

This White House is just so bad at messaging.

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) June 2, 2022

Do you want a red tsunami? Because this is how you get a red tsunami. Whether the messaging is inept due to stupidity, or deliberate prevarication due to malicious intent, the result is going to be the same. So, go ahead, Democrats, “run away, run away.”

The parents are watching – and preparing to vote.

Featured image via alamosbasement on Flickr, cropped, Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)