On the menu today: In another sign that the bottom is falling out for the Biden administration, ABC News declares that Biden’s executive orders on climate change will fall short in a news headline . . . before he actually unveils them. Meanwhile, the White House press corps starts asking harder questions about what the president is doing on all those days when he has no events on his public schedule; there’s a curious detail in the biography of one of the contenders to lead the U.K.’s Conservative Party; and this morning brings a vivid lesson in looking up a few facts about a topic before offering a sweeping conclusion about it.
The Biden Administration Withers in the Summer Heat
Last week I wrote, “Democrats are just tired of Joe Biden and of having to explain away his poor performance. . . . Nobody’s willing to cover for this guy anymore; no one is inclined to avert their eyes when Biden or his wife blurts out something tone-deaf now.”
Yesterday, Ed Morrissey noticed that Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Fallon are now making jokes about Biden’s age and unpopularity. (“I hope they have air conditioning over there, because his bones are made of peanut brittle. . . . There is something older than Joe Biden. It’s the universe.”) Biden’s been unpopular since last summer and old for a few decades; but something changed recently, and I think in some Democrats’ minds, the image of Biden fist-bumping a Saudi prince whom he once pledged to turn into a pariah was the straw that broke the camel’s back. (No, that’s not a Saudi Arabia joke.) Biden just looks too hapless, too weak, and too easily pushed around by events for Democrats to feel all that motivated to defend him.
And I think this newfound, long-repressed exasperation with Biden is bursting out from underneath the surface in all kinds of unexpected ways. Here’s the ABC News headline about Biden announcing “executive actions to address climate change”: “Biden to announce executive actions on climate change that still fall short.”
Yikes! Biden hasn’t even announced it yet, and it’s getting slammed as insufficient in a news headline, not an op-ed or column. Of course, the story is framed from the perspective of green activists who want Biden to do more, so this is a criticism from the left, not the right. But fascinatingly, the article, at least as it’s written this morning, doesn’t include any quotes from disappointed climate-change activists. Reporters Ben Gittleson and Morgan Winsor just assert that these are feel-good half-measures:
President Joe Biden is expected to announce on Wednesday a few executive actions to address climate change, with a focus on helping Americans facing extreme heat — but the steps fall far short of the more sweeping measures climate activists are calling for.
In fact, the directives largely appear to provide more funding to or otherwise strengthen existing programs. . . .
The White House said Biden will also announce “additional actions to boost the domestic offshore wind industry.” Further information on those actions was not immediately available, and it was unclear whether they would be new or impactful.
Yesterday brought another example of newfound press skepticism of the usual Biden team spin. Long overseas trips can be exhausting for lots of people, particularly those who are about to turn 80 years old. Biden returned to the White House from his Middle East trip at 1 a.m. Sunday and had nothing on his public schedule Monday or Tuesday.
Yesterday’s White House press conference featured several questions from reporters asking just what Biden had been doing the past two days.
Here’s how White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre handled the question:
So, he’s been in meetings! I was scheduled to meet with him today in the Oval Office, so he’s been meeting with his senior staff. He’s been meeting with staff. I think some of you might have seen him when, when the first lady of Ukraine was meeting with our first lady. I believe you saw him very briefly. So he’s just been very busy dealing with the issues of the American people and meeting with his staff, and senior staff, the last two days.
Biden is scheduled to depart the White House today at 11:45 a.m., and he’s scheduled to give remarks shortly before 3 p.m. in the afternoon. The last public event on his schedule was the GCC + 3 Meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a working lunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Jeddah at 8 a.m. Washington time Sunday, 3 p.m. local time in the kingdom.
In light of all this, it is not exactly shocking to hear that the White House is “considering a major overhaul of its press and communications shop in the coming weeks,” as NBC News reports.
But as I noted last month, for all of her flaws, Karine Jean-Pierre isn’t exactly the real problem. If the White House doesn’t want tough questions about the president not doing any public events for three days, then Biden shouldn’t go three days without doing any public events. There is no good answer for Jean-Pierre to give in that circumstance, other than to say, “He’s almost 80, he’s jet-lagged, and he needs to rest up. If there’s something that needs immediate attention, his staff will wake him.”
And if a normal presidential overseas trip exhausts Biden for about 72 hours, then maybe he shouldn’t be president.
The Tory Who Worked on Bush’s Presidential Campaign
I don’t have much of a dog in the fight in the U.K. Conservative Party’s decision of who will follow Boris Johnson. But one of the options, Penny Mordaunt, stands out for a curious detail in her biography.
(Our John O’Sullivan, who follows British politics much closer than I do, writes of Mordaunt, “She has everything going for her, including a military record in the Royal Navy, but one strike against her: At an earlier stage of the gender-ideology debate, she committed herself clearly to the proposition that ‘transwomen are women,’ and that position surfaced like an enemy submarine to threaten her.” Elsewhere, our Andrew Stuttaford is skeptical about her promises to dramatically reduce carbon emissions.)
In some of Mordaunt’s biographical materials, it says, “In 2000 she served as Head of Foreign Press for George W. Bush’s presidential election campaign.”
Except . . . foreign citizens generally can’t work on presidential campaigns. The Federal Election Campaign Act and Federal Election Commission regulations “include a broad prohibition on foreign national activity in connection with elections in the United States”:
Commission regulations prohibit foreign nationals from directing, dictating, controlling, or directly or indirectly participating in the decision-making process of any person (such as a corporation, labor organization, political committee, or political organization) with regard to any election-related activities. Such activities include, the making of contributions, donations, expenditures, or disbursements in connection with any federal or nonfederal elections in the United States, or decisions concerning the administration of any political committee. Foreign nationals are also prohibited from involvement in the management of a political committee, including any separate segregated fund (SSF), nonconnected committee, or the nonfederal accounts of any of these committees.
However, foreign nationals can perform uncompensated work for campaigns:
Generally, an individual (including a foreign national) may volunteer personal services to a federal candidate or federal political committee without making a contribution. The Act provides this volunteer “exemption” as long as the individual performing the service is not compensated by anyone.
Then there’s this brief description of Mordaunt’s work in a Daily Telegraph article from 2001:
[Cherylyn] Harley was flown to London in an exchange of spin doctors that saw Penny Mordaunt, the Tory party’s 28-year-old head of broadcasting, work for the Bush campaign in Washington last year. She will spend a fortnight at Central Office providing briefing for the foreign media and advising officials on how to counter Labour attacks.
So, Mordaunt’s work as “head of foreign press” for the Bush campaign was an unpaid gig, or a gig where the British Conservative Party was paying her salary? And for how long? Was it a similar “fortnight” — two weeks?
Doesn’t this make the description of serving “as head of foreign press for George W. Bush’s presidential election campaign” sound like a bigger deal than it actually was?
ADDENDUM: This morning, our Nate Hochman offered Matt Walsh a useful lesson in Googling a topic before you make sweeping declarations about it.