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 | Email Max It’s fair to say JOE BIDEN has had better weeks. A number of high-profile setbacks — from Congress to the Supreme Court — have seriously imperiled his ability to fight the Covid-19 pandemic and protect voting rights. If that weren’t enough, on a psychic level, a despondency is starting to take over parts of his political party right at a time when he needs engagement most. Democratic operatives increasingly say they’re fearful the base will disengage out of a sense of hopelessness and a fear of institutional collapse. The inability to move voting rights reform through the Senate is the primary catalyst, sparking real fears that democracy itself is teetering. But the depression is owed to other factors too. Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is stuck, dooming—for the time being—the main vehicle of hope for climate activists. The prospects of police reform appear dead. The prescription drug reforms the party thought would be their electoral elixir are on ice. And the extended child tax credit, which made a huge dent in alleviating child poverty and was hailed as a surefire political winner, was allowed to lapse. One top donor said that among the money men and women of the party, “there is a frustration and it’s real.” Against this backdrop, the concern goes, it becomes slightly audacious for Democrats to ask their base to come out for them once more next fall. “I think it is very hard to convince voters to go to the polls when they feel like the people they are going to put into office can’t pass any laws to do things to help their lives,” said MAX BERGER, who served as director of progressive outreach to ELIZABETH WARREN’ s presidential campaign. “If elections and putting people into office send them to institutions that don’t work, what's the point of showing up in the first place?” “Showing up.” It’s a simple concept and the currency of politics. Those who want to affect legislation, or get politicians elected, need people to rally around doing it. And, right now, they’re not. When Biden and Vice President KAMALA HARRIS were in Georgia this week, it wasn’t just STACEY ABRAMS who declined to come, but some local voting rights activists too. I’ve thought about “showing up” in recent days as I was writing my piece on BRIAN WALLACH and his wife SANDRA ABREVAYA , who started an entirely new ALS advocacy organization from scratch shortly after Brian’s diagnosis with the disease. The two of them placed a bet: that they could marshal thousands of people who were quite literally dying in order to change the way the government approaches deadly diseases. And they did it. At the end of the last year, Biden signed their legislative priority into law, opening up hundreds of millions of dollars for ALS research and expanded clinical trials. What was the trick? One was that Brian was indefatigable in his advocacy. But what stuck with me was what Sandra said in one of our last talks. She wanted to change the very nature of an ALS story, from something tragic into something hopeful. They wanted patients to believe they could change D.C. And when they got them to believe, they mobilized them. As Democrats and their allies look to turn around what Grid News’ MATTHEW ZEITLIN dubbed a "bad vibes spiral,” they’ve turned to a few tricks. They’ve touted the stuff they’ve done, from infrastructure to Covid-relief, from judicial appointments to expanded health care access, from an improving jobs market to a vaccination campaign that’s reached tens of millions. They’ve chosen not to sugar coat the difficulties but, rather, make a virtue of the fact they tried, knowing the likelihood of failure. And they’ve injected some sense of optimism into the falling-apart narrative. “There’s a lot of talk about disappointments in things we haven’t gotten done,” Biden said on Friday. “We’re going to get a lot of them done, I might add.” How far this gets the White House is anyone’s guess. Just as it’s unclear how despondent Democrats may actually be. The vast majority of voters are not attuned to the daily moves of the political news cycle. The sense of doom and inaction could very well be replaced by something else, including a case for “showing up” that is compelling. “It is not a time to say, ‘Oh, we give up.’ I think people understand there is a very small group of people standing in the way of progress,” said SHAUNNA THOMAS, the co-founder and Executive Director of the progressive womens’ issues group, UltraViolet. “I think Biden and leading Democrats have a role to play in making the case for bigger Democratic margins [in Congress] and going on offense.” PROGRAMMING NOTE: We’ll be off this Monday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but will be back in your inboxes on Tuesday. We hope absence makes the heart grow fonder. HAPPY TRAILS TO YOU… It’s also a bittersweet day for the West Wing Playbook team. TINA SFONDELES , the stalwart co-author of this newsletter who has helped steer us through many hectic days during the first year of the Biden admin, is signing off and leaving us for a cool new gig in her hometown of Chicago. We won't spoil the news about what she’s up to, but we'll miss her tremendously. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you CAMERON WEBB, senior policy adviser to the Covid-19 response team? We want to hear from you — and we’ll keep you anonymous. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com or you can text/Signal Alex at 8183240098 or Max at 7143455427. | 
