Report on ‘Dysfunction’ in Biden White House Reveals More Than 70 People Manage President’s Social Media Accounts
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Managing President Joe Biden’s social media accounts is a monumental task that requires more than 70 people, according to a report by CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere.
“Beneath Biden’s struggle to break through is a deeper dysfunction among White House aides,” reads the headline on Dovere’s in-depth analysis of the staffers who are responsible for Biden’s messaging efforts.
Pandemic-driven isolation kept the team apart, working together only over Zoom, for the first part of Biden’s presidency, and they “still struggle to get in rhythm,” Dovere wrote.
Other foundational fractures arise from the generational gap between the president’s long term advisers who, in many cases, have been a part of his inner circle longer than many other staff members have even been alive. The 79-year-old Biden “still thinks in terms of newspaper front pages and primetime TV programs,” and there’s a divide between how the president and his older advisers view media and younger staffers agitating for a new approach:
Older aides dismiss the younger aides as being too caught up in the tweet-by-tweet thinking they say lost the 2020 election for everyone else. Younger aides give up — what’s the point of working up innovative ideas, they ask themselves, if the ideas constantly get knocked down and the aides get looked down on for suggesting them?
Dovere also described a pervasive sense of frustration among staffers unable to get the president’s messages to break through, finding it difficult to get TV channels to carry his speeches live from events around the country, continually poor metrics on local news coverage and social media engagement, and ongoing data points showing that they’re mostly reaching voters who have already made up their minds.
“Why are we doing this?” one source lamented to Dovere, regarding the massive amount of work being done only to repeatedly fail to capture positive media attention.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates is quoted multiple times in the article defending the administration’s strategy, revealing that “over 70 people on staff” help create digital content and manage the various social media accounts. Even now that they’re finally able to meet in person, coordinating a coherent strategy among that many people seems to be proving to be a challenge.
Biden isn’t without his strengths, perhaps most notably the “the retail politics virtuosity of finding the humanity in almost anyone he talks to and having them find the humanity in him” Dovere reports aides describing as the source of his best moments as president and what “makes him the happiest.”
Effectively capturing those moments is another thing altogether, and one not so easily engineered when virtually all of the current matters on his plate — the war in Ukraine, inflation, baby formula crisis, mass shootings — aren’t ones that can be quickly or easily solved, and aides voiced concerns about the president looking ineffective. And the speeches where he’s stuck standing behind a podium might make for presidential-type photo ops, but they aren’t ideal for connecting with voters.
A plan proposed by White House chief of staff Ron Klain back in January to have Biden start holding a monthly town hall “got sucked into the maw of blaming and dysfunction like so much else: Some aides embraced the idea for at least shaking things up a little, some mocked it for being an outdated idea, some complained that the logistics of making that happen would be impossibly time consuming.”
The team was unable to agree on a plan, and so far no town halls have been scheduled, although a White House aide told CNN they are still planning to have some soon.
