Only one year into his first term in the Oval Office, Joe Biden is laboring under approval ratings so dismal, they make Jimmy Carter look like a great president by comparison. As many — even in his own party — seem to realize, the stage is set for a wave of Democratic defeats come the 2022 midterms. The solution many are offering makes about as much sense as a post-sundown speech by the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Blame it all on White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.
As the Washington Examiner reported Sunday:
As the Biden administration continues to suffer low approval ratings and frequent setbacks, some are calling for President Joe Biden to make major staffing changes.
One prominent target is White House chief of staff Ron Klain, as critics say he has steered the administration into an ever-leftward position and a number of unforced errors.
And:
Most recently, Indiana Sen. Mike Braun called for White House staff term limits on Groundhog Day, calling for Klain and 18 other Biden aides to be drained from the swamp.
Braun isn’t alone. “Ron Klain has an army of Twitter trolls that he has decided are reality and he has decided to have President Biden become something completely different than the person who ran for office last year or who served for decades in the United States Senate,” Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse said in a January statement as the White House was pushing to end the Senate filibuster. “President Biden ought to have the courage to stand up to his own staff and he ought to be enough of a man to apologize to the Senate and to the American people for the nonsense he said in Georgia.”
In a later statement to Fox News, Sasse said Biden “ought to fire his chief of staff immediately” over the filibuster fiasco.
Braun and Sasse are joined by House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), and Senator John Thune (R-S.D.) in calling for Klain’s ousting, with Thune calling Klain “the man behind the curtain.”
Klain has also drawn fire from his own liberal party, with the common thread being that he is responsible for driving Biden into the leftmost lane. As Politico reported in late January:
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.”
Granted, Klain is a leftist’s leftist and a driving force toward the leftward direction of federal policy. As the Washington Examiner reported:
Much of the Klain criticism stems from his well-documented love of Twitter. Klain found himself in trouble after retweeting an MSNBC anchor’s description of the OSHA vaccine mandate as the “ultimate work-around” for the government, which the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals cited in its decision to stay the requirement.
Klain also reportedly upset West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin during negotiations over the doomed Build Back Better bill and leaked news of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement ahead of the official announcement, leaving the 83-year-old justice apparently blindsided when the news came out in the press.
But blaming Klain for Biden’s extreme leftism misses the point: Biden is an extreme leftist. His policies (historical and contemporary) demonstrate that. Klain may fit right in, but only in the birds-of-a-feather type of way, not in the cause-and-effect type of way. Sure, Klain makes a likely (and plausible) scapegoat, but does anyone who has actually followed Biden’s career really think that jettisoning Klain will cause Biden to correct course and become the “moderate” he used to pretend to be?
And when that little trick fails and his policies and “leadership” continue to drag America into an ever-increasing, ever-darkening nightmare of extreme leftism — with increasingly lower and lower approval ratings for Biden — who will be the next scapegoat? Perhaps his loyal partisans will cast a furtive eye toward White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, claiming that the lies she tells on Biden’s behalf have caused the American voter to distrust the man who has habitually lied to them about everything from COVID, to the economy, to Afghanistan, and nearly everything in between.
It must be noted that Klain and Biden have history together — lots of it. Klain has been with Biden since the latter’s time in the Senate, through his time as vice president, and now in the West Wing. They are connected by time and vision. Klain is following where Biden leads. To suppose that Klain is responsible for Biden’s extreme leftism is to suppose that wet streets cause rain. Klain is bad, but he is not a loose canon; he is a canon well under the control of his master, Joe Biden.
While it is understandable that Democrats — predicting receipt of a major walloping in the 2022 midterms — would look for someone besides Biden on whom to pin the blame, it is odd to see prominent members of the party which is about to deliver that walloping offering a scapegoat to lighten the beating.
As stated above, Biden is an extreme leftist. And he — and his accomplices — are on the brink of getting their just deserts. Rather than offering Biden and Company a plausible excuse for his disastrous policies, Republicans should seize the opportunity to call Biden out as the closest thing to a communist to ever sit behind the Resolute Desk. Instead of offering him a way out, they should just leave him alone: He already has plenty of rope with which to politically hang himself.
After all, Biden’s numbers are lower than One-Term-Do-Nothing Carter’s were at this same point in his presidency. As a recent FiveThirtyeight poll found, Biden was at a mere 42 percent on day 380 of his time in the Oval Office. At that same mark, Carter was 10 points higher, at 52 percent. As history records, Carter not only ended his presidency in a complete bust (after hitting a low of 28 percent on day 903), but he practically guaranteed the landslide victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980, with Reagan carrying 44 states and gaining 489 electoral votes.
And while Democrats managed to hang on to both the House and the Senate in the 1978 midterms, these are very different times and Democrats are already bracing themselves for a monumental defeat across the board in 2022, with many Democrats avoiding Biden like the plague in hopes that doing so may save them from the purge to come.
Biden is on his way out, and he appears to be prepared to drag his party down with him. And Klain — while certainly complicit — is not to blame. Yes, Klain should be fired, but this should be accomplished by firing Biden in the 2024 election.
