When you’ve lost NBC……………
I love this part:
Beyond policy, Biden is unhappy about a pattern that has developed inside the West Wing. He makes a clear and succinct [yeah, sure baby] statement — only to have aides rush to explain that he actually meant something else. The so-called clean-up campaign, he has told advisers, undermines him and smothers the authenticity that fueled his rise. Worse, it feeds a Republican talking point that he’s not fully in command.
Well, when you have apparently have senile dementia, making stupid off the cuff remarks that constantly get corrected by your staff the lackeys of your puppet masters, and also sound like a broken record repeating utter crap-for-brains nonsense, it sure does appear that he isn’t in command of anything.
Just me, but the question arises about SloJoe™ feeling his staff ‘undermines him’. If he feels that way, why weren’t those people fired the second time it happened? (figuring you’d warn them after the first time to stop it) One obvious answer is that he can’t, because he’s been told who is really running the show, and it ain’t him. He’s nothing more than a figurehead who gets ordered about like an actor.
BLUF
“We’re on a track — a losing track,” Faiz Shakir, a senior adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, said of the Democrats.
Inside a Biden White House adrift
Amid a rolling series of calamities and sinking approval ratings, the president’s feeling lately is that he just can’t catch a break — and that angst is rippling through his party.
WASHINGTON — Faced with a worsening political predicament, President Joe Biden is pressing aides for a more compelling message and a sharper strategy while bristling at how they’ve tried to stifle the plain-speaking persona that has long been one of his most potent assets.
Biden is rattled by his sinking approval ratings and is looking to regain voters’ confidence that he can provide the sure-handed leadership he promised during the campaign, people close to the president say.
Crises have piled up in ways that have at times made the Biden White House look flat-footed: record inflation, high gas prices, a rise in Covid case numbers — and now a Texas school massacre that is one more horrific reminder that he has been unable to get Congress to pass legislation to curb gun violence. Democratic leaders are at a loss about how he can revive his prospects by November, when midterm elections may cost his party control of Congress.
“I don’t know what’s required here,” said Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., whose endorsement in the 2020 Democratic primaries helped rescue Biden’s struggling candidacy. “But I do know the poll numbers have been stuck where they are for far too long.”


Gail Collins