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 Max The Biden White House may be plotting out a new phase of the pandemic, one in which Americans live with the virus, aided by better therapeutics and enhanced knowledge of preventative steps to take. But the notion that this will be a political elixir for JOE BIDEN heading into the midterms seems increasingly far-fetched. That’s because the lingering impact of Covid-19 is measured not just in the level of physical and mental suffering inflicted but by the serious erosion of trust in and use of U.S. institutions. Across the board, a massive upheaval is underway in American society. Some of it can be seen through a positive lens. The historic number of workers quitting or changing their jobs, for example, doesn’t just show a wild labor market but that the balance of the business-worker relationship is tilting back towards workers. But, by and large, the data shows people are no longer turning to the groups, entities, organizations and community structures that had been social pillars. Children are leaving public schools to attend private ones. School enrollment is down. Teachers are looking to leave their profession. So too are nurses. Trust in the healthcare system is declining as is trust in our federal healthcare authorities. Data collected during the pandemic showed that one-in-three practicing Christians dropped out of church completely. People are canceling their news subscriptions, and not just as a cost-saving measure. In one Nieman lab survey, 30 percent of respondents said they did so “due to ideology or politics.” Data kept by Morning Consult shows that trust in Congress is at new tracking lows; that only 47 percent of the population has faith in the U.S. electoral system; and that confidence in the Supreme Court went from 62 percent at the start of Biden’s presidency to 52 percent now. Where support is rising is in the wrong places. One study from November found that 30 percent of Republicans, 17 percent of Independents, and 11 percent of Democrats agreed “that they might have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” For Biden, these trends hurt in macro and micro ways. A president who wants to expedite the end of the pandemic needs a population who trusts the health care system and the vaccine that it helped produce. He also needs faith in the media as he uses it to communicate the importance of that vaccination campaign. Beyond that is the larger idea that if people see institutions — from school boards to the Senate — failing to work the way they’re expected, they take out their frustrations on the person in charge. “Our parties and politics now is much closer to these parliamentary style parties where the opposition will oppose the whole program. This leads to frustration even when you are in power,” said ERIC SCHICKLER , an American political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. “You get this sense, 'Oh, we’re in power but we can’t do anything.'” Among Biden allies, this is accepted wisdom, even if it seems particularly unfair. Failure to control the pandemic, they argue, is not because of anything Biden did or didn’t do so much as the end product of political opportunism and a disinformation campaign led by conservative media. The inability to combat restrictive election laws and attacks on democracy isn’t due to lack of desire on the president’s part, but because arcane Senate rules stood in the way. “Biden is getting blamed for things in the system that are just sort of part of the system,” said JULIA AZARI, a professor of political science at Marquette University. “He can’t do this. He can’t do that. He can’t make [West Virginia Sen. Joe] Manchin do anything. He can’t make federalism different…. It turns out that what needs to happen in order to restore a sense of normalcy is to do some abnormal things and I don't think Biden has the support of that.” Whether Biden is prisoner to factors outside of or within his control doesn’t change the fact that he finds himself politically confined. He was elected in large part to restore a sense of normalcy — as longtime Democratic operative KEN BAER once put it to me, "This was an anti-change election”—and things don’t feel normal. Fixing that problem, in the end, will prove trickier than learning to live with the pandemic. “I’ve been thinking about what people wanted when they elected Biden,” Azari noted. “The disconnect that it would be a transformative presidency and the reality now has been a disaster. But I do think this presidency could age well. It could be like [Harry] Truman where people realize this person had an extremely raw deal… and actually did some good things even if it was a politically and policy troubled presidency. It will just take time.” TEXT US — Did we miss something about where the country is headed and the midterms? Send us an email or text and we will try to include your thoughts in the next day’s edition. Can be anonymous, on background, etc. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com or you can text/Signal Alex at 8183240098 or Max at 7143455427. WHAT YOU TEXTED: In response to yesterday’s top about Biden’s “Cancer Moonshot,” a longtime family friend from Delaware wrote this to us: “[Thursday] would have been Beau’s 53rd birthday. To us who have known the Biden family for decades, the timing of today’s event was certainly not coincidental but deeply meaningful to the President, to Dr. Biden, and the family.” Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you KATE CHILDS GRAHAM, the vice president’s director of speechwriting? We know you’re leaving but email/text us! Please?
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