Biden is aiming to hit the road to reset his presidency. He starts with yet

On Jan 28, 2022

Never mind that Biden has already held eight events in Pennsylvania since taking office, that Pittsburgh was the city in which he both began and ended his campaign or that trips highlighting manufacturing have been a staple of the past year.

In this reset, what’s old is new.

But, for all the discussion inside and outside the West Wing of a tactical reset, events over the past week have shown that external forces will have more bearing on his trajectory than anything his staff can conceive of in a memo. A series of developments this week — all politically advantageous — provided a window into the challenges and opportunities facing a White House trying to dig out of a political hole by shifting Biden’s public image.

Justice Stephen Breyer’s decision to retire from the Supreme Court created a rare political bright-spot for Biden, who has promised to nominate a Black woman to fill the vacancy. There have been signs that ongoing diplomacy with Russia over its build-up of troops on the Ukrainian border may be working, though any optimism at an easing of tensions within the White House is highly guarded. And a wintertime surge of Covid-19 cases has begun to ease in many parts of the country, leading to cautious hope that the worst of the Omicron wave is over.

White House officials see the very real possibility over the course of the next several months that the pervasive pandemic will start to dissipate, inflation will start to decelerate and stalled legislative priorities will find pathways forward. Under that rosy, but not unthinkable, scenario, the sour mood that has pervaded the country could begin to lift.

White House tries to break through nation’s malaise

But there are clear limits to what Biden can personally do to ensure any, or all, of those things occur as planned. And previous efforts to translate positive developments into political capital have fallen short.

That has led to some soul-searching moments in the Oval Office. Advisers and others familiar with the discussions said Biden has wondered aloud why majorities of Americans say the economy is doing poorly when the numbers show otherwise. Eventually, those questions about whether his message was landing were replaced by Biden explicitly telling his advisers he knows it’s not — and asking for ways to address the shortcoming.

It was also Biden who told advisers that they could no longer tiptoe around the issue of rising prices that his economic team long predicted would be merely temporary, the sources said. That led to a messaging shift, with Biden repeatedly and explicitly acknowledging of the difficulty for working families posed by inflation sitting at a nearly four-decade high.

Since then, however, little the President has said or done appears to have convinced Americans that what he is doing is working to improve the economy and the overall condition of the country.

It’s something White House officials have seen in black and white through their own internal polling, according to people familiar with the surveys, but a deeper thread of concern has drawn more attention in recent months: A growing level of exhaustion and resigned indifference. The trend has concerned Biden’s aides,…

Biden is aiming to hit the road to reset his presidency. He starts with yet

White House tries to break through nation’s malaise

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