Biden’s chief of staff started strong and earned plaudits. But, increasingly, he’s under scrutiny for the state of the presidency.
Politico
As Joe Biden limps into his second year in office, a common criticism has emerged among fellow party members: his top advisers are too insular, rigid and self-assured.
At the center of it all is Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain.
For months, moderate Democrats in Congress have complained that Klain is overly deferential to their liberal colleagues, to the point where some members and Hill staff privately said he needed to be replaced. With Biden’s domestic agenda stalling out, the Covid pandemic lingering and inflation rising, second guessing of his leadership is now coming from a wider swath of the party and even some corners of the administration.
“The president was elected because we all thought he was going to be good at governing,” said a House Democratic lawmaker, who spoke candidly about Klain on condition of anonymity. “He was going to govern from the center, he was going to work with Republicans. And to have a chief of staff that apparently has decided that he’s going to be Bernie Sanders, I think that’s confusing. It’s just not helpful.”
At the peak of the Democratic infighting this fall over how to pass Biden’s domestic agenda, the same Democratic lawmaker fumed that “Ron Klain should be fired.”
During his news conference Wednesday, Biden said he wanted to diversify the advice he’s receiving, including by leaning more on outside advisers. But he scoffed at the idea that he shared Sanders’ socialist ideology and said he remains confident with his team, including Klain, who worked for Biden during his Senate years and when he was vice president. White House officials note that despite the intraparty drama, Biden has notched major victories — from Covid-relief to the bipartisan infrastructure bill. They argue that he is positioned for more and that Klain is instrumental to that goal.
“You got to work at it every day. And that’s what Ron’s good at,” said Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff during the Clinton administration who has spoken multiple times with Klain since he took on the job. “He’s steady. He’s a real strong leader. He knows what the president thinks and why he thinks it and what he wants to get done.”
Bowles paid him perhaps the highest compliment he could: “I’m not going back to Washington under any circumstance,” he added. “But Ron is somebody I could work for in a heartbeat.”
While Klain retains his defenders and the support of the president, some in his party said they don’t believe he’s personally shouldered enough of the blame for the administration’s current troubles. For example, Klain, who is a habitual user of Twitter and a regular presence on TV, has repeatedly told aides, elected leaders and close outside allies that the Biden administration needs to do a better job of touting its accomplishments. But the directive has struck some as detached given that responsibility for communication failures is, to a large degree, his own. Notably, in the past few days, Klain has been on a media blitz.
