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| | | | |  | | By Max Tani and Alex Thompson | Welcome to POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook, your guide to the people and power centers in the Biden administration. With help from Allie Bice. Send tips | Subscribe here | Email Alex | Email Max HARRY TRUMAN famously said that if "you want a friend in Washington" you need to "get a dog." President JOE BIDEN's staff found themselves a buddy, and all they had to do was look on Twitter. Followers of top White House officials have likely seen numerous tweets over the past several months recirculating material from PATRICK DE HAAN. He’s a Chicago-based petroleum analyst and media relations vice president at GasBuddy, a tech platform that offers information on pump prices across the country. As gas prices have declined over the last twoplus months, De Haan, who tweets under the moniker @GasBuddyGuy and writes a blog about gas prices, has become a favorite in the Oval Office. White House chief of staff RON KLAIN regularly shares De Haan’s stats about falling gas prices across the country. He’s not the only one in the administration: De Haan has also caught the attention of other administration higher ups like AMOS HOCHSTEIN , one of the president’s top energy advisers and confidantes, who has also tweeted out his recent stats. De Haan is a familiar face to business media consumers, too, regularly appearing on financial outlets like CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg to talk about energy. During a phone call with West Wing Playbook last week, he acknowledged the recent online love he’s gotten from Klain but emphasized his work is purely analytical and nonpartisan. He said he isn’t trying to score political points from his tweets, analysis, and predictions. He’s merely a markets man. In that vein, he told West Wing Playbook that he actually doesn’t hold Biden (or any recent president) responsible for swings in gas prices, noting that global energy markets are outside any single leader’s control. De Haan pointed out that when prices were going up, right-leaning accounts regularly blasted his tweets, and now that prices are falling, he’s found love from many of the president’s supporters. “It doesn’t surprise me that politicians seeking to politicize prices one way or another are trying to use a subset of my tweets to make a point,” he said. The Biden White House has been particularly obsessed with the price of gas, believing that it will be one of the main issues for voters in the midterms. They have argued that if Biden got blame for prices rising, then he deserves credit for their plummet. To claim that credit, they’ve aggressively amplified any news of the latter. That includes Gas Buddy Guy, who is part of a stable of Klain Twitter account faves that West Wing Playbook has dutifully cataloged. The others include Democratic strategist SIMON ROSENBERG, 20-something Biden superfan @BidensWins, and Washington Post columnist JENNIFER RUBIN (though Klain has cooled from sharing the former conservative-turned-NeverTrump writer). Being a part of Klain’s Twitter favorites occasionally has its perks. ETHAN WOLF, who mans the @BidensWins account, told us he has received private encouragement from White House staffers. And Rosenberg keeps in touch with Klain personally. De Haan said he hasn’t heard from the chief of staff directly (yet), and doesn’t really keep up with his voluminous engagement on Twitter — on a recent day he tweeted over two dozen times. But he said his company has previously been in touch with “various members of the White House” regarding gas prices. He also has occasionally spoken with members of Biden’s National Economic Council, and he said the White House sought his company’s help on issues related to the Colonial Pipeline, the U.S. gas pipeline which was the subject of a major ransomware attack in 2021. While his tweets may be popular these days with the White House, De Haan knows it’s conditional. He said he is “cautiously optimistic” about falling gas prices but he said the administration should also be prepared for those prices to level out because of the fragility of the post-pandemic energy market and uncertainty around the ongoing war in Ukraine. “Should the president be happy? I don’t know,” he said. “Motorists probably think that all the issues behind the scenes are solved. But it would not take much to ruffle the feathers of the market again.” PROGRAMMING NOTE: West Wing Playbook will be taking a week-long break starting Monday, Aug. 29. We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday, Sept. 6. We hope our absence makes your heart grow fonder. MESSAGE US — Are you an oil market analyst who speaks regularly to Ron Klain? We want to hear from you! And we’ll keep you anonymous if you’d like. 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.
| | | | STAY UP TO DATE WITH CONGRESS MINUTES: Need to follow the action on Capitol Hill blow-by-blow? Check out Minutes, POLITICO’s 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. | | | | | | | | With the White House Historical Association Which president chose Irish architect JAMES HOBAN to design and build the White House? (Answer at the bottom.)
| | | WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE WANTS YOU TO READ: This WSJ piece by JAEWON KANG and PATRICK THOMAS about how the cost of beef is going down : “Prices of beef, typically among the costliest grocery store purchases, are falling after more than a year of increases, as consumer demand softens for some cuts. Supplies are improving due to better staffing at meat plants, and supermarkets are offering more discounts on rib-eye, New York strip and other often-expensive products.” JESSE LEE, the senior adviser for communications to the National Economic Council, tweeted out the piece Monday. WHAT THE WHITE HOUSE DOESN’T WANT YOU TO READ: This Gallup write-up of its latest survey : “The percentage of Americans who evaluate their lives poorly enough to be considered ‘suffering’ on Gallup's Life Evaluation Index was 5.6% in July, the highest since the index's inception in 2008,” it says. “This exceeds the previous high of 4.8% measured in April and is statistically higher than all prior estimates in the COVID-19 era.” LARRY, LARRY, QUITE CONTRARY: Economist LARRY SUMMERS took to Twitter Monday to offer the White House some advice on how to handle student debt relief. While many progressive Democrats and even some people in the Biden administration want the president to forgive $10,000 or more of student loans, Summers said Biden should not extend the current moratorium or grant what he called “unreasonably generous student loan relief.” Summers, who Biden continues to talk to on occasion, argued that “student loan debt relief is spending that raises demand and increases inflation. It consumes resources that could be better used helping those who did not, for whatever reason, have the chance to attend college.” The administration is expected to announce a decision on the matter as early as this week ahead of the Aug. 31st deadline. MEDIA MOVES: The New Yorker’s ADAM ENTOUS is moving on to a gig at the New York Times, according to NYT’s ADAM GOLDMAN. We previously featured Entous’s in-depth piece about the history of the extended Biden family, which was intended to be part of a book on the Bidens. EMPLOYMENT OFFICE: In recent weeks, we reported on several names in talks to be the next press secretary for the first lady, JILL BIDEN. The previous holder of the job, MICHAEL LaROSA, gave some advice to applicants in this dispatch from Puck’s TARA PALMERI. “If candidates are using this opportunity to raise their own profile, help their chances, or minimize someone else’s chances by proactively floating names and pushing out nuggets to the press, that sort of public jockeying is a great way to turn off the East Wing and inspire them to pursue a whole new field of options,” he said. “Bidenworld does not like showboats.”
| | | SO LONG, FAREWELL: ANTHONY FAUCI , Biden’s chief medical adviser and the face of the government’s pandemic response for the past two administrations, announced he plans to step down at the end of the year. Fauci, who has led the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years, told our DAVID LIM, LAUREN GARDNER and MYAH WARD it felt “bittersweet” leaving. But, even at 81, “as long as I have the excitement, the energy, the passion and the good health, thank goodness, to be able to do something else on the next stage or a few years of my career, I’m excited about it.” Fauci also made the rounds today on his departure with The New York Times, The Washington Post, the AP, and Reuters. He appears on RACHEL MADDOW’s MSNBC show tonight at 9pm ET. FIRST IN WEST WING PLAYBOOK: CHRIS FARLEY has been promoted to chief of staff of the office of the staff secretary at the White House, DANIEL LIPPMAN has learned. He most recently was an associate staff secretary. DANI SCHULKIN, who is associate staff secretary, is taking on additional responsibilities in the office as well. IN OTHER PERSONNEL MATTERS … STEPHANIE PSAKI has joined the National Security Council as a director for global health response in the development and global health directorate, three White House officials told Lippman. Psaki, who holds a doctorate in public health, most recently was senior adviser on human rights and gender equity in the office of global affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to the Biden administration, she led a research center focused on finding effective investments to improve health and education and to advance global gender equity. And yes, she's Jen's sister. DADDY DAY CARE: Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN is a working parent just like many in the administration - and his two young kids (with EVAN RYAN, the head of cabinet affairs) keep him honest. In a lengthy and mostly flattering Washington Post Magazine profile published today, Blinken recalled how he was about to go on a Sunday talk show. “And my wife said to our kids, ‘Daddy’s going to be on TV,’ and the response was, ‘We want to watch Sesame Street!’” Blinken added: “Kids have a wonderful way of reminding you of what’s real.” We’re with the kiddos: Elmo > Stephanopoulos.
| | | U.S. Steps Up Enforcement of Its Long List of Russia Sanctions (WSJ’s Ian Talley) Indiana governor in Taiwan following high-profile US visits (AP’s Huizhong Wu) Summers Urges Fed to Deliver Stark Message on Economic Pain (Bloomberg’s Chris Anstey)
| | | One thing Anthony Fauci will likely get back when he steps down from his post at the end of this year? Time to watch basketball or baseball. Fauci told POLITICO in August 2020 that his long work days didn’t allow for a lot of downtime. “I love sports, I just have not been able to watch any sports on TV because when I get back home at night — at a time when I used to love sitting back and watching a college basketball game or during the summer, I love baseball — I can’t do it because I come back from whatever I’m doing, and I have a couple of hundred emails that I have to answer,” he explained. Those emails can’t usually wait until the next day, he said, “you gotta answer them tonight, and that takes me into the middle of the night.”
| | | President GEORGE WASHINGTON learned of Hoban on a visit to Charleston, S.C., and chose to collaborate with him on the design of the iconic home. A CALL OUT — Do you have a harder trivia question? Send us your best one about the presidents with a citation and we may feature it. Edited by Eun Kyung Kim and Sam Stein.
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