After promising a well-oiled machine, early hiccups have punctuated the rollout of President Biden’s new agenda.
A longtime White House watcher said it is not unusual to see press secretaries “circle back” with reporters, a refrain that has caught the public’s attention.
Press secretaries tend not to be in the president’s inner circle, said historian David Greenberg, author of a book about presidential spin.
“Occasionally, there’s someone who’s been around a long time, who truly knows the president well and has a fairly direct pipeline,” Greenberg told the Washington Examiner. “But it’s more often the case that the press secretary is in that second concentric circle.”
Last month, White House press secretary Jen Psaki compared reporters to psychiatric patients during an NPR interview, drawing questions about the White House’s tactics.
“A lot of people point to Mike McCurry as one of the best,” someone who “spoke candidly and from the heart with his own language,” Greenberg said of former President Bill Clinton’s second White House press secretary.
McCurry told the Washington Examiner he thought Psaki was settling in well enough.
“I think she is doing a pretty good job,” he said.
Her efforts to “circle back” help to ensure the press secretary has accurate information instead of “winging answers,” he added.
There’s the briefing book and other preparation completed ahead of time, “but it’s not altogether surprising that she might be out of step with Biden,” Greenberg said. “Throw into the equation that Biden is not the most precise when it comes to articulating what he means. Biden sometimes just doesn’t put it quite right.”
He added: “Of course, reporters go to the press secretary to clarify. And she may not know exactly what he meant by that.”
Like McCurry, Psaki was a State Department spokesperson before taking the White House press secretary role.
Greenberg recalled a communications fumble following a shooting in a kosher supermarket in France, with former President Barack Obama calling the attack “random” during a media interview.
“It was really just an unfortunate choice of words on his part,” Greenberg said.
Asked about the president’s language, Greenberg recalled that Psaki “could not bring herself to admit that Obama has not chosen the best words” by failing to recognize the attacker’s Jewish targets.
“If a guy goes into a kosher market and starts shooting it up, he’s not looking for Buddhists, is he?” a reporter asked Psaki during a State Department briefing.
She is not speaking from the heart, Greenberg said. “I think that has been coming through.”
Biden waited several weeks to call Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prompting questions over the delay.
Asked to detail the administration’s goals for the Middle East and whether Washington still considers Israel an important ally, Psaki demurred and pointed to “internal interagency processes” under review.
In a subsequent briefing, a reporter asked if she wished to clarify her remarks. She did, stating that “Israel is, of course, an ally.”
The White House’s position on rejoining the Obama administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran, a campaign promise, has also proven complicated, beginning with Biden’s head nod during a Super Bowl interview that seemed to indicate a harder line.
“I think if we were announcing a major policy change, we would do it in a different way than a slight head nod,” Psaki said when asked about the apparent change.
Earlier this month, when the Washington Examiner asked if Iran would need to return to the deal before the United States would speak with the country, Psaki said, “I think we’ve spoken to them” before seeming to backtrack, reiterating the administration’s position that if Iran comes into compliance with the deal, the U.S. will do the same.
Biden and his aides entered the White House promising a shift from the Trump administration, committing to near-daily televised briefings. It’s a stark comparison when Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham failed to hold a single briefing during her more than one-year tenure in the role.
“You have to admit it is a whole lot better than what we went through the past four years,” McCurry said.
Greenberg said McCurry’s strength was talking to reporters “in a way that seems real.”
“Sometimes, you have to say, ‘Look, that’s something I just can’t get into,'” he said. “If you pretend that you are answering everything and not, that creates suspicion.”
Following a report that a top press aide had verbally attacked a reporter, journalists hammered the White House over its muted response, despite the president’s hard stance against abusive workplace behavior.
Psaki first announced the aide, TJ Ducklo, faced a one-week suspension without pay. When the pressure didn’t subside, Ducklo announced his resignation the following day.
On school reopenings, when asked to clarify his policy during a Tuesday town hall on CNN, Biden said the confusion was down to “a mistake in the communication.”
Psaki had said that the White House planned “to have the majority of schools, so more than 50%, open by day 100 of [Biden’s] presidency.”
She said the next day that parents were right to be frustrated.
Political strategist Rory Cooper said that issue comes down to policy, not messaging.
“The White House doesn’t have a communications problem. It has a policy problem,” said Cooper. “That’s why they lean on the word ‘majority’ a lot.”
