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 After weeks of setting expectations for an underwhelming jobs report, the White House this morning got shockingly good news courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nonfarm payrolls rose 467,000 in January. Beyond that, more than 700,000 jobs were added to the totals from November and December, suggesting that the recovery has been far more robust and resilient than forecasters imagined. Data points like these don’t come along all too often. And, in the aftermath of it, something similarly rare occurred. The administration began crowing. “You blew it, we fixed it,” JESSE LEE, a top comms official at the National Economic Council, tweeted at former President DONALD TRUMP adviser STEPHEN MILLER. “Trump is the only POTUS to lose jobs, Biden’s first year was the greatest jobs year in history.” The idea that Democrats would rush to take credit for the best labor market in a generation may seem painfully obvious on the surface; certainly after four years of Trump touting every decent economic metric as a testament to his unique genius and political stewardship. But for decades, the party has been driven by a belief that there are real downsides that come with talking up a recovery while in the midst of it. And even after this morning’s strong jobs news, some party officials were urging the administration and others to remain cautious in how they trumpeted the news. “You should claim credit for progress but with care,” DAVID AXELROD, BARACK OBAMA’s longtime top adviser, told West Wing Playbook. “I don't think you can jawbone people into feeling better. Inflation — and general orneriness after years of pandemic — have left people in a sour mood. You can't tell them what they feel — their lived experience — is wrong. So stick to reality. These numbers are hopeful signs but until we get the virus under control and secure wage gains by dampening inflation, we still have work to do.” PATRICK GASPARD, head of the Center for American Progress, the top think tank in the progressive ecosystem, was similarly circumspect. “You can’t throw a party when everyone is hiding under a blanket,” he said. “Two years of a pandemic that no one really believes is about to end has made us all really pessimistic and unable to hear the good. That is what’s real.” Later in the day, though, he had talked himself into a bit more of a sunny-side-of-life take. The last three Democratic presidents have all found themselves in this same type of delicate political space. Having inherited recessions or downturns or massive job loss, they implemented fiscal policies designed to jolt the economy, only to watch as the country didn’t quite feel it. After the 1994 midterms, BILL CLINTON’s team internalized the notion that voters would recoil if you insisted that their lives were better than they perceived them to be. During the Obama years, talk of a “recovery summer” ran headfirst into the realities of a lingering recession. Aides to the president tried a car-in-the-ditch metaphor to appeal to voters, to little avail. Biden’s situation is different in a couple of important respects. His main problem is a virus, not a collapsed market. He oversees a landscape where states are awash with cash and long-term unemployment is falling; whereas, 12 years ago, budgets were incredibly tight, the rolls of public employees were being slashed, and long term unemployment was dragging. His stimulus was massive (and came on top of Trump’s own macro interventions), whereas Obama’s was kept under a $1 trillion price tag. And that, in turn, is contributing to the biggest difference of all. Inflation is the issue that Biden and his team are grappling with heading into the midterms, and there are painfully few levers that he has to pull in order to tackle it. That’s causing a lot of top officials in the Democratic Party to hit pause before they turn a BLS report into Mardi Gras. But not everyone. JAMES CARVILLE , the patron saint of the Clinton-era mantra to not overhype a recovery that voters don’t feel, had a slightly different take on Friday’s jobs report. Biden, he said, should be modest in his assessment of the progress made but entirely bullish about the progress to come. He likened it to a gambler, shooting craps for 45 minutes before deciding: “screw it, I’m gonna keep pressing.” “I would act like this is going to continue, but not celebrate the moment,” Carville said. “We're moving in the right direction. And then, come July, assume it will be there. I mean, somebody is going to feel it at some point because workers just have so much power. And if they don't feel it, or if inflation rate is at seven percent, well, then we’re probably not going to win anyway.” TEXT US — Did we miss something about the latest jobs report? 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. Do you work in the Biden administration? Are you in touch with the White House? Are you KEVIN LO, a deputy chief of staff at the Office of Science and Technology Policy? Email/text us! Please?
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