The White House is in crisis. It must be true: Even CNN is saying it. President Joe Biden will be furious when he hears — if anyone bothers to tell him. More importantly, Debra Messing, the star of the ’90s sitcom Will & Grace, is already furious, according to leaks from a July 6 call between what CNN describes as “White House aides” and “dozens” of celebrity Democrats.
“Messing said she’d gotten Joe Biden elected and wanted to know why she was being asked to do anything at all,” CNN reported, citing three loyal participants who leaked faster than a rusty sieve. The report has the ring of truth, especially the bit about Messing “yelling that there didn’t even seem a point to voting.” Everyone knows that feeling — even the diminishing ranks of those who have yet to attain social media stardom.
The administration has neither the will to do much nor the grace to concede that it has lost its way. The defining image of Biden’s presidency will be his slapstick falling off a stationary bike or a mushroom cloud over eastern Europe. Only months ago, CNN was assuring us that Biden’s decline was no problem, and anyway, if he was declining, it wasn’t by much, and telling us not to worry because if he were in decline, then his chief of staff Ron Klain would catch him, and anyway, Klain, a veteran of former President Barack Obama’s administration, was the one in charge. As with the greenhorn Obama, so with the silverback Biden: The White House had depth on the bench.
We were told this by a media that would have settled for Idi Amin or Pol Pot over Donald Trump. But we were also told this by Messing. She was hilarious as singleton interior designer Grace Adler in Will & Grace, so I, for one, am willing to hear her thoughts on matters of state. She may be far to the left on Twitter, but she is right about the Biden administration’s paralysis. If the Biden administration were a comedy show — Dr. Jill, perhaps — the studio would not take the option on a second series. What has gone wrong?
In 2008, Obama’s team promised a “team of rivals” whose members would put aside factional differences and concentrate on the job of ripping off the people through Obamacare. What we got, Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair noted in 2012, was “a demographically balanced assembly of team mascots with increasingly ill-defined roles,” with the real power exercised by the advisers in the West Wing. Unfortunately, the West Wing is not The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin famously moved his plot and players forward by having his characters walk and talk simultaneously. In reality, they struggle to pull off this most advanced of bureaucratic maneuvers.
When the Democrats returned in 2020, Klain promised teams without rivalry. His experience overseeing Obama’s 2009 stimulus legislation and as Obama’s “Ebola czar,” Klain said, had shown him that the problem was bureaucratic conflict between the agencies. The answer, he promised, was “comprehensive, whole-of-government solutions.”
Translated, this meant adding a new layer of authority. Gina McCarthy, an expert at dispensing the red tape from her time at the Environmental Protection Agency under Obama, was appointed as the nation’s first national climate adviser. With time to spare in her job heading the Domestic Policy Council, Susan Rice was in charge of fixing systemic racism, though without a title such as national racism adviser because David Duke already holds that one.
These solutions invent new bureaucratic problems of a kind that only the bureaucracy can fix. Any preschool teacher will tell you there is no such thing as teams without rivalry. A quick look at a map will show that the climate of the United States cannot be controlled or even advised: It is part of a global system, and only the Europeans share the Democrats’ climate apocalypticism. And how can a bureaucracy fix systemic racism without quantifying the problem? Is there a metric? Will we receive a racism rebate if things are found to improve?
As Klain’s answer to the gumming up of the bureaucracy was to pour on more glue, and as Congress’s answer is always to pour on more money, the wheels now turn ever more slowly and expensively. No wonder political scientists like Messing are furious. But bureaucratic paralysis is not a new problem. It is what bureaucracies are best at. The bureaucratic answer is to appoint Messing as the national complaint adviser.
