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Presented by Facebook: | | | | |  | | By Alex Thompson and Sam Stein | Presented by Facebook | Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. Send tips | Subscribe here| Email Alex | Email Max Vice President KAMALA HARRIS isn’t trending. And there’s a likely reason for that. While the White House’s digital team counts about 20 people on staff, Harris’ digital team consists of just one twenty-something staffer and a part-time veteran videographer. The staffing disparity has made Harris less of a presence on social media than she could be at a time when her approval ratings lag behind JOE BIDEN’s. Since Inauguration Day, Harris has posted about 1,100 times on her official vice presidential Facebook page and 452 times from her @vp account on Instagram compared to Biden’s 2,200 Facebook and 800 Instagram posts from @potus, according to Facebook’s internal tool, Crowdtangle. Harris’ deficit on video content — which takes longer to produce — is even greater. Since Jan. 20, 2021, Biden’s team has posted 476 videos on Facebook, which have earned 125 million views, compared to 110 videos with 11 million views for the vice president. On Instagram, Biden’s White House team has posted 223 videos with 212 million views compared to Harris’ 83 videos and 57 million views. Some of this is to be expected. By definition, the VP takes second billing to the president and a White House is more prone to promote the latter than the former. Biden’s posts will almost certainly earn more engagement and views. And Harris’ digital deficit, for example, appears smaller than the one that existed between DONALD TRUMP and MIKE PENCE. But the gap has nevertheless frustrated some Harris and Biden allies alike, who see social media as an easy way to boost the vice president and counteract some of the tough headlines she’s faced over the past year. “More posts don’t fix the vice presidency but it does leave a vacuum for others to fill for you,” said one person familiar with the internal dynamics. Harris spokesperson SABRINA SINGH told West Wing Playbook: “The Vice President’s office has a small but mighty digital operation that executes a daily and long-term messaging strategy and works in close coordination with the President’s digital team.” The White House’s digital team is about the same size as BARACK OBAMA ’s White House team in 2016, despite social media becoming more central to political communication. Aides there have said they feel stretched thin as it is and have been unable to provide much help to the tiny Harris team, according to three people familiar with the dynamic. The White House’s digital lead, ROB FLAHERTY, also is a more experienced digital operative and has strong relationships with other senior White House officials, which has empowered him to push Biden’s team to do more online. A White House official said that the office of digital strategy regularly partners with Harris’ office and has produced graphics and videos with her team. The official noted that Harris’s digital staffer, BRENNA PARKER, also joins the White House digital team’s daily call, long-term planning meetings, and gave a presentation at a team retreat today. But the disparity in content production between the VP’s office and the White House is also the result of a decision by the vice president’s team — which has discretion over its own budget — to hire only one full-time digital staffer. The vice president’s director of video, HOPE HALL, has only been brought on part-time. She is the former videographer for Obama and Sen. ELIZABETH WARREN’s presidential campaign. Still, Harris’ digital operation has seen improvement. Her political accounts, which are run in coordination with the Democratic National Committee, had problems early on. After Inauguration Day, the @kamalaharris Instagram account only posted twice over the first 100 days. Since then, the account is averaging four posts a week, per Crowdtangle. TEXT US — Are you BRENNA PARKER, Kamala Harris’ lone full-time digital staffer? We want to hear from you (we’ll keep you anonymous). Or if you think we missed something in today’s edition, let us know and we may include it tomorrow. Email us at westwingtips@politico.com or you can text/Signal/Wickr Alex at 8183240098 or Max at 7143455427.
| | A message from Facebook: Why Facebook supports updated internet regulations
Paige is one of many experts working on privacy at Facebook—to give you more control over your information.
Hear from Paige on why Facebook supports updating regulations on the internet’s most pressing challenges, including federal privacy legislation. | | | | | | This one is from Alex: Which president gave zero speeches during his presidency other than his two inaugural addresses (which he read almost inaudibly)? (Answer at the bottom.)
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Cartoon | Courtesy of Steve Kelley/Pittsburgh Post Gazatte | Every Friday, we’ll feature a cartoon of the week — this one is courtesy of STEVE KELLEY. Our very own MATT WUERKER also publishes a selection of cartoons from all over the country. View the cartoon carousel here.
| | | ANTI-ASSASSINATION — White House press secretary JEN PSAKI was asked today about Sen. LINDSEY GRAHAM’s (R-S.C.) tweet last night, in which he called for someone close to Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN to, essentially, off him. “That is not the position of the United States government and certainly not a statement you’d hear come from the mouth of anybody working in this administration,” she replied. TWEET HEAT: Yesterday, we reported that a number of Democrats were anxious to see the White House make a sharper contrast with Republicans over the crisis in Ukraine. Mainly, they wanted Biden to hit his GOP critics — at least the DONALD TRUMP-supportive corner of them — for being Putin apologists. Well, today, White House staff secretary NEERA TANDEN went and did it. “Glad people are seeing the light but hard to forget how many people have been Russia stans on this website - who literally attacked those of us who pointed out Russia’s autocracy and creeping fascism,” Tanden tweeted. KAMALA WEIGHS IN: The vice president’s office blasted out a statement from the Veep herself today taking aim at Florida’s House Bill 5, which restricts abortion rights after 15 weeks of pregnancy. “This bill is extreme by any standard,” the statement read. It called the ban “unconstitutional” and reiterated the administration’s pledge to fight it and similar legislative efforts. CZEŚĆ: Harris is also headed to Poland and Romania next week, and will meet with leaders of both countries about the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, her office announced this afternoon. It will be her second trip to Europe in the past month. WHAT’S IN A FRAME? Last week, we wrote about the frustration within the White House that their Build Back Better agenda was framed in the media as a social spending bill and not an economic stabilization one. Well, Biden himself has now articulated that gripe out loud in a sit down with historian, and substacker extraordinaire, HEATHER COX RICHARDSON. And he took a bit of a shot at Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.) to boot. “What people don’t realize, mainly because one senator from West Virginia talks about how it’s all social spending, well all the money in Build Back Better provisions, there is about $500 billion of it is for the environment,” said Biden. “Five hundred billion is for the environment. But the other parts are for the best way to deal with people who have been getting the short end of the stick, as they say, for a long time.”
| | | | SUBSCRIBE TO NATIONAL SECURITY DAILY : Keep up with the latest critical developments from Ukraine and across Europe in our daily newsletter, National Security Daily. The Russian invasion of Ukraine could disrupt the established world order and result in a refugee crisis, increased cyberattacks, rising energy costs and additional disruption to global supply chains. Go inside the top national security and foreign-policymaking shops for insight on the global threats faced by the U.S. and its allies and what actions world leaders are taking to address them. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | | STRAIGHT TALK: CDC Director ROCHELLE WALENSKY sat down with students at Washington University Medical School yesterday and had some blunt assessments about the future of Covid and early missteps While emphasizing that she couldn’t predict the future, she said she thought that: “Ultimately we will have a coronavirus that will, you know, it will lead to death in some people in every season and that we will then tolerate in some way.” She also admitted that the CDC and the new administration were too bullish about the vaccines early on: “I think we had perhaps too little caution and too much optimism for some good things that came our way. I think all of us wanted this to be done….Nobody said ‘well, what if the next variant doesn’t — it’s not as potent against the next variant.’” NEVER TWEET: The State Department backed away from a tweet sent by its own embassy in Ukraine today. CNN reported that the State Department told all embassies to not retweet or un-retweet this missive: “It is a war crime to attack a nuclear power plant. Putin's shelling of Europe's largest nuclear plant takes his reign of terror one step further. #TheHague #Zaporizhzhia #StandwithUkraine.” We asked what was up and a senior State Department official told us: “The intentional targeting of civilians or civilian objects, including nuclear power plants, is a war crime, and we are assessing the circumstances of this operation.” As for the tweet, the official said that “it shouldn't come as a surprise that we prioritize message coordination and consistency and especially so when it comes to sensitive issues. We are confident that Americans and audiences around the world are much more interested in the substance of our policy — what we're doing on an urgent basis to unite the world, support Ukraine, and hold Putin accountable — than the sausage-making of social media posts.” HELP WANTED: The IRS plans to hire 10,000 new full-time workers to play a direct role in helping the agency reduce its backlog of millions of unprocessed tax returns and other mail from individual and business taxpayers, AARON LORENZO reports.
| | | | A message from Facebook:   | | | | | | JOBS, JOBS AND, WELL, JOBS: Well. This one was unexpectedly good. U.S. employers added 678,000 jobs in February, and had upward revisions for the two months before that. It was, as the AP put it, “another gain that underscored the economy’s solid health as the omicron wave fades.” One interesting data point, courtesy of Odd Lots podcast’s JOE WEISENTHAL: there were about 9,000 job gains in laundry and dry cleaning — a sign, perhaps, that people are increasingly going back into the office (can’t show up to your formal place of work in pajamas…. Or can you?). THAT NPR POLL: There haven’t been many polls that Democrats have been happy to push out these days. But they got one on Friday when NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist found Biden’s approval rating jumped eight points following his State of the Union address. He was still underwater, at 47 percent approval, but it was his best showing in a while. As always, one poll is pretty meaningless. Trends matter more. So salt, grain, etc….
| | | A.T.F., agency crucial to Biden’s gun plan, struggles to push for reform (NYT’s Glenn Thrush) Chicken companies were asked about sharing of employment practices (WSJ’s Patrick Thomas and Brent Kendall)
| | | He received the President’s Daily Brief this morning and spoke by phone with President ANDRZEJ DUDA of Poland to discuss their joint response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the afternoon, Biden delivered remarks on the jobs report and new White House proposals to strengthen “Made in America” requirements for federal procurement. National Economic Council director BRIAN DEESE and CELESTE DRAKE, director of “Made in America” policies at OMB, also attended. The president also held a bilateral meeting with President SAULI NIINISTÖ of Finland to discuss the latest developments in Ukraine and how to strengthen the European security order. He and the first lady will depart for Wilmington, Del. this evening, where they will spend the weekend.
| | | She had a bilateral meeting with Bahrain’s Crown Prince and Prime Minister SALMAN BIN HAMAD AL KHALIFA in the Vice President’s Ceremonial Office.
| | | | DON’T MISS CONGRESS MINUTES: Need to follow the action on Capitol Hill blow-by-blow? Check out Minutes, POLITICO’s new platform that delivers the latest exclusives, twists and much more in real time. Get it on your desktop or download the POLITICO mobile app for iOS or Android. CHECK OUT CONGRESS MINUTES HERE. | | | | | | | | Before he was trotting the globe as secretary of State and trying to resolve the worst conflict in Europe since World War II, ANTONY BLINKEN was playing on an adult league soccer team that was, it appears, quite good. As noted previously in POLITICO , Blinken played “every Sunday in Washington with some of his closest friends in foreign policy, including Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.), U.S. Special Representative to Iran Robert Malley, former Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Philip Gordon, and others.” Malinowski tweeted about their soccer feats when reports first surfaced that Blinken would be nominated to his current post. He included a picture of the team, drenched in sweat, holding trophies alongside the claim that they went undefeated. Taking bets on what position Blinken played. For no particular reason, we’re guessing defender …
| | | THOMAS JEFFERSON. Yes, it surprised us too. According to historian ERIC McKITRICK, Jefferson “was shy and frightened of speaking in public; he would not or could not stand up to other men in debate. He sat mute through the sessions of the Continental Congress, and years later, except for reading his two inaugural addresses in an inaudible voice, he made no speeches during his entire presidency. As a young lawyer he found it painfully difficult to extemporize in the courtroom, and even more so to address juries. He shrank from face-to-face adversarial encounters, and although he found criticism of himself scarcely bearable he would not respond to it in his own voice.” A CALL OUT — Do you have a better trivia question? Send us your hardest question on the presidents and we may feature it on Wednesdays. Edited by Emily Cadei
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