The upside of a year and a half of false starts and disasters, Democrats say: They stumbled into a bunch of good news just before the midterm campaign really got going, and just as the average gas price has dropped below $4 and the Donald Trump’s last week included the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago investigation and the New York attorney general invoking the Fifth Amendment hundreds of times. Three days after Buttigieg’s televised appearances, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called Biden to say he had reached a deal with Manchin and reinstated the President’s agenda. With that deal, which included deficit reductions and the largest investments to fight climate change the US has ever made, now through Congress and headed for the President’s office, Biden and his team are rushing to restore the image they allowed to settle into a delusion. President is wasting his days in the Oval Office as time passed. Three dozen White House aides, members of Congress and senior staff, as well as top political figures spoke to CNN about Biden’s race against time to change perceptions of his presidency. It’s a sprint that aims to defy history by salvaging Democratic majorities in Congress in November’s midterms and — just as crucially for the president — preventing any further defections from within his own party as he looks toward the reelection campaign that is it actually plans to launch early next year. While some even inside the administration see the West Wing as trying to put a rosy spin on a president who hasn’t done much, aides more deeply involved point to calibrated, multi-dimensional, simultaneous strategies often overlooked by those focused only on Biden moving through from Oval Office meetings. I made sure Buttigieg held his own in those Sunday interviews. Deployed Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo for intense national security briefings on China on the Hill to promote the CHIPS and Science Act. There was the group of aides huddling by the couch in the Roosevelt Room on how to feed an echo chamber of prominent liberals blasting Senate Republicans for initially refusing to pass the veterans health care bill out of anger over the reconciliation deal — — and then get the tweets they helped craft in front of wavering Democrats to convince them to drop their objections to help Republicans. And there was the quiet coordination with Manchin and Schumer as Biden held off on declaring the climate emergency that many activists and Democratic officials had been demanding, even though they knew it would once again mean the President would tyrannize social media. networking by its supporters themselves. While several options were lined up for how to declare a climate emergency, Biden aides say the gamble reflects their approach: As frustrated as many of Biden’s supporters may be right now, passing a law produced a far greater effect that cannot simply be canceled by a future president. What came together “wasn’t overnight,” the consultant said. Biden “plays the long game and really has the ability to look ahead and know that you’re going to go through tough times to get there.” Biden’s caution not to make huge demands on either bill — not calling for universal background checks on gun reform, or the full Build Back Better agenda to get them through reconciliation — was also key. “This President, by not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, has helped make so many of these things happen,” said a senior Senate Democratic adviser. The climate provisions are a perfect example of where the White House believes Biden’s role in setting direction is undervalued: Manchin wouldn’t be the 50th vote without Schumer, but they say there wouldn’t be 49 out of 50 votes there without him. Biden. Obama, they will note, did not get 50 of his 59 Senate Democrats on his cap-and-trade plan. But by focusing on investments in clean energy projects that brought in workers — and tapping into a network of unions to continue to speak out, like the network of veterans groups they were in touch with on the burn bill — instead of carbon taxes , Biden “built a climate plan that brought 49 (Democrats) together, and the fusion stuck until the end,” a senior White House aide said. “Obviously, it’s not enough without Manchin. But without the Biden approach, you’re not even one vote away.” However, when Schumer wrapped up negotiations, his first stop was House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, saying they had to speak without staff in the room to keep it secret. Agree to the terms. Biden, who had given Schumer his sign during a call a week and a half earlier, was next to call to hear it happen. Along the way, close advisers say, Biden has proven his theory about his presidency: that major legislation can still move in Washington, that it can happen with bipartisan agreement even amid simultaneous party battles, that what can it seems like outdated rules of governance and politics actually still matter in the age of instant gratification. That the answer to people who yell or make threats is not to yell, no matter what was said about him by Republicans or his own party. In this wave of momentum inside the White House, aides often cite people who have called Biden “naive,” just to shoot down that notion. The line that Biden and his aides often fall back on is that he and his allies “met this moment.” Some in the West Wing have sent up a line from his South Carolina victory speech in 2020, when luck and circumstance, strategy and persistence suddenly resurrected then-candidate Biden after it looked like he was finished: “For those who they’ve been knocked down, counted, left behind, that’s your campaign.” “We can’t do it all the time, and we can’t do it many times, but there are times when we can come together, and we should. And that’s an important message for the country,” a senior White House official told the end of last week.

Summer disappointments

Before warning Buttigieg not to go too far, Biden aides had planned his own big speech in late July in Wisconsin — until aides to Gov. Tony Evers, who is in a tough re-election fight, urged him not to come for he could avoid being together. White House aides had decided to do it anyway, until they realized the necessary security measures would force them to cancel the beloved local Oshkosh air show. Now that big Biden speech is scheduled for sometime after Labor Day. Aides are gearing up for a tough start to the midterm campaign, with the president touting tangible, much-talked-about victories like lower prescription drug costs and gun restrictions while casting Republicans as extremists in the pocket of special interests. The hole Biden hopes to crawl out of is deep and dark. At the time of the speech in Wisconsin, top Democratic operatives were quietly passing on numbers that left them depressed but not surprised. Biden’s disapproval rating was higher than his approval rating in Delaware — the state he represented for 36 years in the Senate, where the main rest stop and train station were named for him years before he was elected president.
The numbers were worse elsewhere. In state after state, district after district, there was a 20- to 25-point gap between voters’ feelings about Biden and their feelings about the Democratic candidates for governor, Senate and House. For the August special election for a House district where Biden swept Trump in 2020, the Democratic nominee leads in two internal polls, but Biden’s approval rating is in the mid-30s. All summer long, Democratic focus groups around the country came back with a consistent complaint about Biden: He didn’t seem like he was even trying to address inflation, or really anything else. Approval ratings have gone down the drain — “there’s no bottom,” one official said late last month at a high-profile race. Asked about Biden’s numbers, Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly insisted he didn’t know how bad they were. Nevada Sen. Kathryn Cortez Masto, another of the most threatened Democratic incumbents, responded to a question about whether she would be swayed by Biden’s low approval rating, saying: “I can just tell you that I don’t take them for granted residents of Nevada. .” “It’s a time when everybody’s been through so much, and even though their personal situation might be good, there’s a lot of anxiety in the country,” Michigan Sen. Debbie Stambenow said, trying to explain how much people had turned on Biden. . , even as other Democrats and the Democratic agenda remained popular. In the weeks after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade and nothing else was going right, that frustration began to seep into the Oval Office. “When you’re the president, you’re the vessel for that frustration. And it’s hard when you’re the most powerful person in the world and you can’t do anything about it,” another White House aide said.

Change in the political winds

The passage of the gun bill after the horrific school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was an important moment, aides say. Not only did it show that Republicans and Democrats could make a deal on an intractable issue, it showed a passion in Biden that hadn’t been evident in previous weeks. The issue has been personally important to the President since he was the senator who ordered the last major gun legislation 30 years ago. The killing of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, aides said, was another major jolt domestically, though it was largely lost in the cascade of other news. One adviser called the moment a “proof of concept” for a President…