When President-elect Joe Biden named his longtime associate Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff, it was widely interpreted as a sign that the new president’s administration would represent the same mainstream and moderate Democratic Party establishment that both of them epitomized.
That was, after all, why Biden had won the presidency after a lifetime of effort aimed at that one goal.
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But with the announcement of Klain’s resignation as chief of staff after two years of hard service, one thing is clear. Expectations that he would be the “prime minister” who would shepherd the administration on a reasonable and moderate path were mistaken. Though Klain ran a fairly tight ship in the West Wing with little of the infighting and chronic factional leaking that characterized the Trump White House, any idea that he would guide an effort to govern like the moderate who most of the country, including many conservatives, thought he was, went out the window almost as soon as Team Biden unpacked its boxes.
Throughout its first two years, Biden’s presidency was consistently in sync with the left-wingers whom he had presumably been elected to thwart. Biden famously told Donald Trump at a presidential debate to “get off Twitter,” but Klain seemed to spend as much time on Twitter as Trump had done. And instead of relying on his vast experience on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue to broker deals with party centrists and even Republicans, Klain and the rest of the administration hewed to the left-wing line on a host of areas. It was telling that Klain wound up becoming quite close with a hardcore left-winger like House Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) while essentially going to war with the party’s most prominent centrist, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV).
Indeed, on virtually every issue on which compromise might have been both necessary and productive, whether it was post-coronavirus pandemic spending bills, vaccine mandates, the massive surge of illegal immigration across the southern border, or the debate about election integrity laws, Biden abandoned the middle ground on which Klain was supposed to have helped him find some consensus with Republicans.
Biden had been supposedly elected to provide a human guardrail against the excesses of his party’s progressives, who had either cheered or turned a blind eye to the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots of the previous summer. By the following January, he and Klain seemed to have believed that bending the knee to the hard Left was key to preserving his governing coalition.
This was reflected in policy choices from the first day of the Biden administration, which began with a slew of executive orders seeking to erase the previous four years’ achievements while also laying the groundwork for a leftist revolution in government. No better example of that exists than the diktat that every government department and agency was required to present a new plan demonstrating its fealty to the woke DEI catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are buzzwords for racial and gender quotas.
The aftermath of Jan. 6
Part of the problem was that in the last days of his tottering presidency, Trump’s sabotaging of Republican senatorial candidates in the Georgia runoffs had gifted Biden and Klain control of both houses of Congress. Thus, rather than having to work with Republicans, Biden had a unified government at his command, raising expectations in his base and even mainstream liberal Democrats that he could govern from the Left.
Perhaps just as influential in their thinking were the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
The disgraceful Capitol riot was an expression of the dark side of Trumpist populism. Trump was already playing with fire by organizing a “Stop the Steal” rally on the day that Congress certified the votes of the Electoral College that elected Biden. Republicans resented the way that coronavirus pandemic measures threw to the winds the traditional guardrails of the electoral process. They had even more reason to complain about the way the legacy media and Big Tech companies had suppressed reporting and discussions of Biden family corruption in the weeks before Election Day.
But there was no evidence of the massive voter fraud they claimed had stolen the election. And when some of the demonstrators broke away and stormed the Capitol, sending Vice President Mike Pence and the members of the House and Senate scurrying for shelter, it finally confirmed the long-held belief of many Democrats that Trump was an authoritarian bully who was unwilling to abide by the rules of a democratic republic.
If at first it seemed the general disgust with Trump was shared by members of both parties, it soon became clear that the events of Jan. 6 had hardened the opinions of many if not most Democrats about not just Trump’s illegitimacy but of all Republicans who had voted for him. Instead of the riot being merely evidence of Trump losing touch with mainstream opinion, it became an “insurrection” for which everyone on the Right who would not renounce ties to Trump or admit that his administration was a blot on the country’s honor was to be held responsible and a seemingly permanent political cudgel with which Democrats sought to beat Republicans. The ex post facto impeachment of Trump led eventually to the creation of the House’s partisan Jan. 6 committee to which the GOP was not allowed to name its own representatives.
While the focus of these controversies was Trump, it had an enormous impact on the way the Biden administration would conduct itself. Politics had already become a tribal culture war even before Trump. But the denouement of his presidency widened the gap between the parties in ways that were at first hard to discern. Faced with accusations of being the moral equivalent of Confederate rebels, almost all Republicans outside of Never Trump die-hards Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger recoiled in anger and doubled down on their disgust for Biden and the Democrats.
Even if Klain had been inclined to seek common ground with Republicans, this toxic atmosphere would have doomed those efforts. And it is in the context of two parties, both of whose caucuses had a higher percentage of ideological hardliners than in living memory, that one must regard the way the Biden White House drifted much farther to the Left than anyone might have predicted in the early stages of the 2020 election.
Democratic establishmentarian
Klain’s resume is a stereotype of someone who has spent his life as a member of the Democratic Party’s branch of the Washington establishment. Indeed, his adult life is a microcosm of the last 40 years of his party’s history.
An Indiana native, after attending Georgetown University, he worked as a Democratic congressional staffer. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he scored one of the city’s most elite entry-level posts as a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Byron White.
Following two terms at the court, Klain worked on Biden’s ill-fated 1988 presidential effort that collapsed in the wake of the Delaware senator’s plagiarism scandals, which included revelations about college misbehavior as well as his bizarre appropriation of British Labour Party leader Neal Kinnock’s biography. Biden stayed in the Senate and took Klain with him as chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he chaired and during which the future chief of staff played a role in the “high-tech lynching” of Justice Clarence Thomas.
Klain continued accumulating establishment credentials in the following years as he worked for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign and then served as associate counsel to the president after 1992. He would go on to become chief of staff to Attorney General Janet Reno and then Vice President Al Gore. From there, he would join a top D.C. law firm while still taking time to assist Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign and then the Florida recount that sealed his defeat.
Like most Democratic insiders, he would spend the George W. Bush administration using his influence and access making money, which in Klain’s case meant lobbying for the Fannie Mae mortgage association.
He returned to government service with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, becoming Vice President Biden’s chief of staff before leaving to serve as the administration’s ebola czar during the 2014 scare about that disease. After a stint helping Hillary Clinton’s 2016 failed presidential run, he returned to the private sector, cashing in again on his insider knowledge as general counsel of the Washington venture capital firm Revolution, which was funded by AOL co-founder Steve Case, before serving as Biden’s pandemic adviser during the 2020 campaign.
Why Biden won
After passing on the 2016 race and letting Clinton lose to Trump, Biden entered the 2020 race as the party establishment’s favorite. Yet he flopped in the first two contests in Iowa and New Hampshire, looking every bit the relic of the bygone political eras in which Biden and then Klain had come of age in the 20th century. That left socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as the front-runner, a prospect that appalled everyone outside of the party’s left-wing base.
But then octogenarian House Assistant Leader James Clyburn (D-SC) mobilized black voters in the South Carolina primary to turn out and vote for Biden. Primary opposition to Biden quickly melted away as the moderates and traditional liberals realized that he was their best and perhaps only hope to defeat Trump’s efforts at reelection.
Biden won the Democratic presidential nomination and then the White House in November based on the same calculation that Clyburn and South Carolina black voters had made in February 2020. Republicans claimed he was an elderly shell of his former self and Biden’s half-century as a fixture in Washington politics provided plenty of embarrassing baggage, as did a reputation for fabulism on the stump. But after years of our national political life being dominated by Trump’s intemperate outlier routine and the equally extreme reaction to him from a Democratic Party that formed a “resistance” to his presidency rather than a traditional opposition, Biden represented a chance for a traditional moderate variety of Democratic Party politics. His would be a presidency in which support for more government entitlements and social justice projects would presumably be tempered by at least lip service toward fiscal prudence along with a foreign policy in which alliances and allies would be embraced rather than alienated or abandoned.
But all that would be largely forgotten after the summer of BLM and Jan. 6. Far from disappearing after Biden’s election, the spirit of the anti-Trump “resistance” that was prepared to wage scorched-earth warfare against the GOP had become the Democrats’ governing philosophy. The political world that had produced Biden and Klain and the entire mindset of moderate Democratic Party politics had died by the time they arrived in the White House two weeks after the Capitol riot.
Twitter troll in chief
Surprisingly for a person who had spent decades in the corridors of power and was expected to use the skills he acquired in his long career to build consensus, Klain spent an inordinate amount of his time as chief of staff on Twitter, where he trolled Republicans and retweeted articles puffing the president’s sagging reputation.
As partisan bitterness fueled by reactions to Jan. 6 convulsed Washington, Klain seemed to be too busy with social media combat to act as a check on the way the administration not only refused to talk with Republicans but also embraced woke talking points on voting and the spread of critical race theory indoctrination in the schools. Indeed, throughout every misstep in Biden’s first year, Klain failed to exercise the restraint that everyone kept assuming he would use on White House staff. Instead of the adult in the room, Klain had become the Twitter troll in chief to Biden, egging on his boss’s worst instincts.
The turning point of Biden’s first year was the calamitous and poorly executed retreat from Afghanistan. The president’s polling numbers collapsed. Yet far from taking that as a sign that the administration needed to chart a course back to the center, Klain doubled down on his embrace of the Left, as the president’s decision to frame the midterm elections as a fight to defend democracy against Republican “semi-fascists.”
Still, Klain emerged from his time as chief of staff with some wins to his credit. Due perhaps to his alliance with progressives, he managed to help keep the narrow Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate united, which with a few GOP aisle-crossers led to the passage of Biden’s inflation-fueling “Build Back Better” massive spending bill. In his second year, he helped stage-manage the passage of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. It was primarily devoted to spending on climate change and did nothing to curb the disastrous inflation that was wrecking family budgets. But it enabled Biden to claim a major legislative victory just at the point when his presidency seemed to be going off the rails with his polls showing him underwater.
The Democrats’ partial revival in the second half of 2022 and their better-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, though they still lost the House with Republicans having a national popular vote edge of 3 million, mean that Klain is leaving Biden with at least a fighting chance to maintain his grip on his party, or at least he did until the news about his mishandling of classified documents seemed to get Trump off the hook on the same issue and remind everyone of the president’s hypocritical criticism of his predecessor.
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But the main conclusion to draw from Klain’s time as chief of staff is that his decisions and actions demonstrate the way the Democratic Party establishment has undergone a fundamental shift since the 1980s and 1990s. Someone with Klain’s background might have been expected to despise his party’s radicals and their ideological obsessions with climate change, open borders, and intersectional myths about race. But as chief of staff, he wound up leaving little daylight between the White House and the rhetoric of the congressional “Squad” and other hardcore progressives.
Rather than being the expression of the normalcy and moderation of the Democratic Party that had governed successfully during the Clinton presidency, Biden and Klain’s White House signaled the death of that wing of their party. After BLM and Jan. 6, there was no resisting the “resistance” even if they had wished to do so. Klain’s successor, Jeff Zients, another veteran establishmentarian, is unlikely to think differently. If this was his last government job, Klain’s career may have epitomized the career path of a Democratic insider, but it also demonstrated that the era of Democratic moderates is over. Instead of cooling down political rhetoric, Klain fueled the continuing decline of public discourse into bitter vituperation. Rather than healing the country’s post-Trump and post-pandemic wounds, the Biden administration’s hard-left turn that he helped oversee has made clear that bipartisanship is dead and the era of partisan culture wars is just beginning.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter: @jonathans_tobin.
