Ron Klain

We might have finally discovered something that politicians are worse at than budgeting: regulating emotions. What is in the water in Washington, DC that is causing these adults to constantly melt down in public? First there was President Biden’s now-former chief of staff Ron Klain. The man who has been accused of being the brains behind the Biden operation is moving on from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue… well, maybe. Klain delivered a mawkish farewell address in the White House East Room, with his 80-year-old boss proudly looking on a few feet behind him. To say Ron got choked up would be an understatement. He gushed over the Biden family and the administration’s accomplishments. He even heaped praise on Joe Biden’s parenting skills.

After President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last year, White House chief of staff and the administration's resident Twitter addict Ron Klain joined a confab of journalists on Twitter Spaces to discuss the speech. When a reporter asked Klain, in response to Biden’s poor approval ratings, whether he thought they were having trouble getting their message out, Klain responded, “Well, I’m doing Twitter Spaces, aren’t I?” It was a perfect demonstration of how Klain had taken to guiding administration policy in accordance with the whims of Twitter.

Top Twitter user Ron Klain is at it again. This time, the terminally online White House chief of staff tweeted out a list of talking points to bring up when your Uncle goes after Joe Biden at Thanksgiving dinner. Putting aside the fact that uncle should only be capitalized when it is being used as a proper noun, Cockburn is stunned at the daftness of the compilation. https://twitter.com/WHCOS/status/1595414110438662144 Klain claims that “gas prices are down by $1.35/gallon since June and inflation is moderating”, which while technically true, requires you to ignore the fact that gas prices were over $4.90/gallon in June. He uses the same laughable logic regarding inflation: it has "moderated" from a multiple-decade’s high of 9.1 percent in June to a still painful 7.

President Biden’s team of progressive bow-tied brainiacs are getting out their Champagne flutes. Can you blame them? Sure, the rest of the country may be struggling with inflation, high gas prices and soaring crime, but Team Biden is not going to let normal people problems get in the way of their celebrations. According to the mainstream media, Biden is killing it. The New York Times tells us, “Biden Is on a Roll That Any President Would Relish. Is It a Turning Point?” New York magazine writes, “Biden’s On a Roll. So When Will His Approval Rating Go Up?” Politico wonders, “Biden suddenly is piling up wins. Can Dems make it stick?

Joe Biden would never be in a hair band; a hair plugs band, maybe. Yet the president does seem to be following a maxim known well to every aging rocker: when nothing else is working, you hit the road. So it was that yesterday Biden left Washington on a tour that sent him to Los Angeles with stops afterward in Santa Fe and Philadelphia. And while his handlers seem to have talked him out of doing the whole thing via Amtrak, there are other reasons to think this is not a typical presidential jaunt. From out of the White House has come news that the president is frustrated with his dismal poll numbers. He's also reportedly tired of being over-handled by his staff — and fair enough.

Cockburn has never been a fan of White House chief of staff Ron Klain. The man simply inhabits a different universe: Klain thinks inflation is no big deal while Cockburn is currently subsisting off of the free peanuts at his local bar; Klain's favorite hobby is Twitter while Cockburn's is seeing how long he can drink gin on the White House Ellipse before the cops chase him off. Yet even Cockburn has been surprised at the ferocity with which Washington has turned on Klain over the last week. A slew of articles, most of them from mainstream media sources, have identified Klain as the reason the president's policy agenda has stalled.

Joe Biden usually likes being compared to Donald Trump. During the 2020 presidential campaign the media often contrasted the two figures in order to highlight how much more decent and compassionate and normal Biden is, as opposed to Orange Man. However, the empathizer-in-chief might not be as crazy about the latest parallels emerging thanks to his poll numbers. A headline in Newsweek, not exactly a right-wing rag, reads, “Joe Biden’s Approval Lower Than Donald Trump’s at Same Stage of Presidency: Poll.” The president’s current approval rating according to the Quinnipiac poll is a dismal 33 percent. Considering how slanted these polls can be, the real number might be even worse.

Cockburn was weighing his post-Thanksgiving options this past weekend: the fifth leftover sandwich of the day or the rest of the pricey claret that his hedgie brother had brought to lunch (a rare act of generosity from the spoiled brat). Just as he had settled on the correct answer to this conundrum (both), his appetite was quickly satisfied by a particularly juicy morsel buried the pages of Politico. Christopher Cadelago and Meridith McGraw report that after his 2020 victory, Joe Biden called Lincoln Project co-founder Steve Schmidt to “say thank you for the group’s work helping him get elected.

During the 2020 election, Joe Biden positioned himself as the Democrat who could win the working class from President Donald Trump. "Joe from Scranton," as the media affectionately calls him, was bringing normalcy back to the White House. But Joe from Scranton is a fiction and a fake. Trump may love a good show  — "stay tuned!" — but it is Biden who oversees the most inauthentic administration, one that is shockingly divorced from the lives of everyday Americans. The country is currently facing a massive breakdown in the global supply chain, leading to shortages of goods and increased prices for consumers. My local grocery store boasted large gaps on food shelves Thursday morning. A friend of mine was unable to buy a simple coffee from Starbucks.

We begin today with the reigning alpha of the self-celebrated political super-staffers. Enter Ron Klain, President Joe Biden's chief of staff, who is a polymath in the D.C. sense that he has both a job and a Twitter account. Klain last week made news when he endorsed a tweet that dismissed our current bout of inflation as a mere problem for the "high class." Cut to Jeff Bezos weeping at the grocery store: "I can't possibly afford any of this!!!" Klain, according to a New York Times profile, is neighbors with Chief Justice John Roberts and lists Twitter as a "hobby," so you can tell he's the well-adjusted sort.

It’s time for Pete Buttigieg to truck off down the road from the Department of Transportation — if, that is, he turns up for work again and can find a driver. It’s shameful even by the standards of the federal government for the head of a department to disappear during an emergency. It’s ludicrous for a technocratic Democrat in a technocratic administration. The smart set are explaining away the supply-chain fiasco as middle-class false consciousness. ‘Most of the economic problems we're facing (inflation, supply chains, etc.) are high class problems,’ says Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. That’s right, Ron: if the peasants can’t find vegetables on the shelves, let them eat the rich.

Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, in the recent Virginia gubernatorial debate against Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin, touted an odd endorsement: founder of the Weekly Standard and editor-at-large of the Bulwark, Bill Kristol. 'I left a huge surplus when I left office. And that's the reason so many Republicans have endorsed me — over two dozen prominent Republicans. Tonight, I have the leading conservative in America here, Bill Kristol, who has endorsed my campaign for governor,' McAuliffe said. https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1442999842771546113 Any right-leaning politico couldn't help but laugh at the notion that Kristol is the nation's 'leading conservative’.

After the country vanquished tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump last November, Jen Psaki, among others, promised that the days of unhinged 2 a.m. tweets from the executive branch were over. Instead, the Biden White House stacked its comms team with former Obama administration millennials more famous for their posturing on the ‘promise of hashtag’ and #UnitedForUkraine than for a cohesive message. Some things don’t change. Trump primarily used his Twitter feed to lash out at media critics and yell at athletes. But the Biden administration is also using Twitter, to guide its policy and messaging decisions by gleaning them from a willing media. Take White House chief of staff Ron Klain.

Neera Tanden will not be the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. The Biden administration quietly withdrew Tanden’s nomination last night, finally facing up to the daunting odds of her being confirmed. Accounts of this ill-fated nomination vary. Some on the right see Tanden as a sacrifice to distract from the greater threat of HHS nominee Xavier Becerra, described by Nebraska’s Ben Sasse as a 'culture war supersoldier'. The press, inclined to view the world through a Kremlinological lens, interprets it as an indictment of White House chief of staff Ron Klain’s leadership. Klain was by all accounts Tanden’s biggest supporter in the West Wing and shares many of her conspiratorial and bombastic tendencies, especially on Twitter.