Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Tina Ask any veteran of BARACK OBAMA’s first term in office what the most politically-gnawing moment was for them and the answer is likely to be the 2010 BP oil spill. The pure environmental degradation that resulted from more than 4 million barrels of crude oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico was tragic enough. But in addition to that were two other elements that made the issue particularly excruciating. The first was the ubiquity of it. For 87 days, the story was the same, emphasized by the live video feed of Deepwater Horizon’s broken well under the water: Oil was gushing into the Gulf and the administration was unable to stop it. The second was how it ended. After weeks of failed efforts to put a cap on the ruptured wellhead, BP successfully used a ‘static kill’ to stem the flow. And then, just like that, the news coverage sort of went away. “We would send out 10-page documents every day that showed every single thing we were doing, every resource we were deploying, every inter-agency effort that was underway. But as long as that oil continued to spill out in the Gulf, it was live on television opposite the briefings,” recalled BEN LABOLT, who was working in the Obama communications department at the time. “When the hole was finally plugged, the press just moved onto another story. A missing plane or person. There is no parallel coverage for having effectively managed the issue.” The political saga of the BP oil spill looms large for Democrats today as they assess the state of the Biden White House. There is no harrowing environmental catastrophe currently unfolding (at least not as acutely and theatrically as what happened in 2010). But there is a sense inside the administration that the progress being made is getting no attention, at least relative to the attention given to the problems that precipitated their action. They have a case to make, one that BRIAN DEESE, director of the National Economic Council, laid out today in the briefing room. Just in the past few weeks, there have been reports that the supply-chain crisis that drove the inflation spike was beginning to cool and that the semiconductor chip shortage that grabbed headlines was showing signs of relief. Food costs are looking like they’ll be falling, wages are rising, and economic confidence seems to be bouncing back, ever so slightly, from the Delta variant-driven dip. Just this morning, jobless claims came in at an all-time low adjusted for population. The economic recovery is fairly robust, certainly when stacked against other countries. Virtually all the schools are open, despite panic that Covid fears would keep them closed. Booster shots picked up after a rocky unveiling around guidance over who could get them. And gas prices—the most iconic symbol of the administration's coming electoral doom—are trending downwards, with expectations that they will keep falling. One White House official noted that on the three immediate missions President JOE BIDEN had when he came into office — shots in arms, money in pockets, and kids back in schools — the administration has had major success. And that success, the official added, has come despite Covid lingering and vaccine skepticism persisting. So why isn’t this the predominant story line? That question is what gnaws at this White House, which, along with its allies, has adopted a notably more aggressive communications campaign to claim the credit they feel they deserve. But the actual answer is multifaceted. Part of it is the surrounding context that muddies the “success” narrative. The vaccination progress hasn’t been easy and the pandemic still painfully lingers, with the Omicron variant adding an even more foreboding layer. And while a combination of tax cuts and rising wages has meant disposable income is up, the cost of goods is too (lumber prices, for instance, are back up ), complicating the picture of the financially-better-off middle class family. Part of it is that Biden doesn’t necessarily deserve credit for the recent “successes,” in the same vein that he didn’t deserve blame for the many crises the pandemic created. Take gas prices. Their rise was owed to society emerging from a pandemic that dramatically reduced travel. The current fall is owed to a variety of forces outside Biden’s control, among them that a warmer-than-expected winter should help take the sting out of heating bills. But part of it is, admittedly, the modern media climate, which is geared around covering the visceral and dramatic (usually how problems present themselves) rather than painstaking and non-linear (often the form in which progress takes place). It’s quite plainly an issue now, as it was when LaBolt was dealing with it 11 years ago. And it’s one both the media itself and the White House will have to reckon with. “The big picture is improving but the administration is not getting the requisite credit in the press,” he said. “It creates a negative feedback loop and a vicious cycle. And it requires direct communication to voters to explain to them the progress they’re making.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you DIONNE N. JACKSON, deputy associate director for policy? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous: westwingtips@politico.com. 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